Drawn in 1971 and 1972, these stories expand Yoshihiro Tatsumi's prolific artist's vocabulary for characters contextualized by themes of depravity and disorientation in twentieth-century Japan.
Some of the tales focus on the devastation the country felt as a result of World War II: in one story a man devotes twenty years to preserving the memory of those killed at Hiroshima, only to discover a horrible misconception at the heart of his tribute. Yet, while American influence does play a role in the disturbing and bizarre stories contained within this volume, as always it is Tatsumi's characters that bear his hallmark, muddling through isolated despair and fleeting pleasure to live out their darkly nuanced lives.
About the Author
Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1935, Yoshihiro Tatsumi began writing and drawing comics for a sophisticated adult readership in a realistic style he called “Gekiga.” He is the cartoonist of The Push Manand Other Stories and Abandon the Old in Tokyo.
Adrian Tomine is the author of Scenes from an Impending Marriage, Shortcomings, Summer Blonde, Sleepwalk, 32 Stories, and the comic book series Optic Nerve. He is also an illustrator for The New Yorker, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, and his stories have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading and An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Tomine lives in Brooklyn, New York.
