A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

The epic autobiography of a manga master

Acclaimed for his visionary short-story collections The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye―originally created nearly forty years ago, but just as resonant now as ever―the legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi has come to be recognized in North America as a precursor of today’s graphic novel movement. A Drifting Life is his monumental memoir eleven years in the making, beginning with his experiences as a child in Osaka, growing up as part of a country burdened by the shadows of World War II.

Spanning fifteen years from August 1945 to June 1960, Tatsumi’s stand-in protagonist, Hiroshi, faces his father’s financial burdens and his parents’ failing marriage, his jealous brother’s deteriorating health, and the innumerable pitfalls that await him in the competitive manga market of mid-twentieth-century Japan. He dreams of following in the considerable footsteps of his idol, the manga artist Osamu Tezuka (Astro Boy, Apollo’s Song, Ode to Kirihito, Buddha)―with whom Tatsumi eventually became a peer and, at times, a stylistic rival. As with his short-story collection, A Drifting Life is designed by Adrian Tomine.

Biographical Notes:

Born in 1935, Yoshihiro Tatsumi began writing and drawing comics for a sophisticated adult readership in a realistic style he called Gekiga. He is widely credited with starting the gekiga style (dramatic pictures) of alternative manga in Japan, having allegedly coined the term in 1957. Under that name, he helped nurture a genre of noir-ish manga that — with its commitment to greater psychological depth and the plight of the underclass — was pitted against the perceived frivolities of mainstream children’s publications.

In 2008, Tatsumi published an autobiography in manga form, titled A Drifting Life (Gekiga Hyouryuu). It received the 2009 Tezuka Manga Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in the field. Over the past few years, collections of his work from the late 60s and early 70s have been published in Spain, France, and Poland, and by Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly. As his work of that period suggests, Tatsumi belongs to a generation of Japanese authors who cut their teeth in the hardscrabble 50s and whose vision of Japan remained, even well into the golden 60s, one of poverty and impotence.

Quotes / Reviews:

“In the hands of a talent like Tatsumi . . . hidden worlds are excavated and dark corners of the human condition illuminated.” — Bookforum on Yoshihiro Tatsumi

“His nakedly personal work, created when the medium was predominantly impersonal, made Tatsumi unique in Japan and around the world.” — Print on Yoshihiro Tatsumi

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