Yoshihiro Tatsumi Books In Order

The Push Man and Other Stories

A collection of short stories from the grandfather of Japanese alternative comics. Legendary cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi is the grandfather of alternative manga for the adult reader. Predating the advent of the literary graphic novel movement in the United States by thirty years, Tatsumi created a library of literary comics that draws parallels with modern prose fiction and today’s alternative comics. Designed and edited by one of today’s most popular cartoonists, Adrian Tomine, The Push Man and Other Stories is the debut volume in a groundbreaking new series that collects Tatsumi’s short stories about Japanese urban life. Tatsumi’s stories are simultaneously haunting, disturbing, and darkly humorous, commenting on the interplay between an overwhelming, bustling, crowded modern society and the troubled emotional and sexual life of the individual.

Abandon the Old in Tokyo

These stories get under your skin and invite rereading. BookForum
Abandon the Old in Tokyo is the second in a three volume series that collects the short stories of Japanese cartooning legend Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Designed and edited by Adrian Tomine, the first volume, The Push Man and Other Stories, debuted to much critical acclaim and rightfully placed Tatsumi as a legendary precursor to the North American graphic novel movement. Abandon the Old in Tokyo continues to delve into the urban underbelly of 1960s Tokyo, exposing not only the seedy dealings of the Japanese everyman but Tatsumi’s maturation as a story writer.

Good-bye

Prepare to be disturbed and blown away. The stuff is remarkable, amazing. Los Angeles Times
Good Bye is the third in a series of collected short stories from Drawn & Quarterly by the legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, whose previous work has been selected for several annual top 10 lists, including those compiled by Amazon and Time. com. Drawn in 1971 and 1972, these stories expand the 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 directly as a result of World War II: a prostitute loses all hope when American GIs go home to their wives; a man devotes twenty years of his life 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, it is hardly the overriding theme. A philanthropic foot fetishist, a rash ridden retiree, and a lonely public onanist are but a few of the characters etching out darkly nuanced lives in the midst of isolated despair and fleeting pleasure.

Black Blizzard

THE PREEMMINENT GEKIGA KA’S FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL FROM FIFTY YEARS AGOCreated in the late 1950s,Black Blizzard is Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s remarkable first full length graphic novel and one of the first published examples of Gekiga. Tatsumi documented how his love for Mickey Spillane and hard boiled crime novels led him to create this landmark genre of manga in his epic, critically acclaimed 2009 autobiography, A Drifting Life. With Black Blizzard, Tatsumi explores the dark underbelly of his working class heroes that five decades later has made him one of the best known Japanese cartoonists in North America. Susumu Yamaji, a twenty four year old pianist, is arrested formurder and ends up handcuffed to a career criminal on the train that will take them to prison. An avalanche derails the train and the criminal takes the opportunity to escape, dragging a reluctant Susumu with him into the blizzard raging outside. They flee into the mountains to an abandoned ranger station, where they take shelter from the storm. As they sit around the fire they built, Susumu relates how love drove him to become a murderer. A cinematic adventure story, Black Blizzard uncovers an unlikely love story and an even unlikelier friendship.

A Drifting Life

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.