Living the dream
Since 2005, Montreal publisher Drawn and Quarterly has been releasing English translations of Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s works.
The manga writer/artist’s stories have been collected in the anthologies The Push Man, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye.
These volumes, elegantly designed and hardbound, have served to introduce the so-called “godfather of gekiga” to a new generation of readers.
Previous editions of his work translated into English, including the ones by now-defunct publisher Catalan in the ‘80s, have long been out of print and are now difficult to find.
Gekiga, loosely translated, means “dramatic picture story.”
Tatsumi coined the term in his early years as a cartoonist to distinguish his work from manga, which are dominated by comedies and children’s adventure.
The types of stories Tatsumi wanted to tell were more realistic and concerned adult matters—not adult as in pornographic, but adult as in the complexities of love or the loss of love, obsession, despair in joblessness, depression, and more.His latest opus, A Drifting Life, differs from previously mentioned releases, as it is non-fiction and autobiographical. Neither is it an anthology but a massive, 800-page work.
A Drifting Life, which took him over a decade to complete, was published in English only a few months after it was originally published in Japan.
This April it received top honors at the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prizes.
Incidentally, Tezuka, the godfather of manga, was an early and strong influence on Tatsumi. In the book he recounts his experience meeting the comics master and being further inspired.A Drifting Life begins after the conclusion of the Second World War, when the young Tatsumi goes back to school and pursues his dream of being a manga author—a dream he shares with his brother.
His relationship with his brother is one of the most touching threads in the book. It is slightly contentious in the beginning when his older brother is ill and resentful of Tatsumi’s freedom to create manga and live a fuller life while he is confined at home, sickly.Later the disagreements are about Tatsumi’s decision to do more “mature” and experimental stories, which strikes his older brother as overly ambitious. In time they are able to mend their differences and become respected authors.Through his life story we learn a good deal about post-war Japan and how it slowly healed from deep wounds, both literal and figurative.
For these occasional historical anecdotes Tatsumi changes his style, using actual movie posters of films that were cultural touchstones to the Japanese people, or photos to distinguish the regular story from his actual life.One of the more interesting aspects for me were his influences from cinema, a trait he shares with another comics master, Will Eisner.
Though continents apart, the two sought to incorporate an experimental spirit in their works to lend them a new vibrancy.
His predilection for more mature stories is something he shares not just with Eisner, but with the underground comix movement that began in the ‘60s. Though they weren’t familiar with each other’s work, they somewhat led parallel careers.As with the previous collections of his work, A Drifting Life shows Tatsumi’s gift of storytelling, as one becomes fully immersed in the young author’s dreams and hard work, betrayals and dark times, moments of joy and revelation.
