“There was no freedom in reality,” Tatsumi wrote in his memoir, in which he turns himself into a character named Hiroshi. Tatsumi found creating comics exhilarating. He was in junior high when he met one of his idols, comic artist Osamu Tezuka, who encouraged him to draw. His parents ran a laundry but often could not afford to pay for his schooling, so he passed the time in comic book shops. He was 10 when the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. “It’s been over 30 years since these stories came out,” critic Carlos Santos wrote in a review of “Abandon the Old in Tokyo” for Animé News Network, “but the main themes, such as companionship, self-worth and family, are still universal issues today.”īorn in Osaka on June 10, 1935, Tatsumi was one of four children in a poor family. There was a lot of anger and bitterness … and I was writing and drawing all these stories to reflect how I felt and to release my frustrations.”Īlthough it took three decades for his graphic stories and novels to reach a wide Western audience- “The Push Man, and Other Stories” and “Abandon the Old in Tokyo,” were originally published in Japan in 19, respectively-his themes resonated with contemporary audiences. “The Japanese economy was going well, but my life and those of ordinary Japanese workers were not changing. “I didn’t want to write bright things, they were just not true,” Tatsumi told Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper in 2010. They became a prime audience for the kind of story Tatsumi wanted to tell. This dark view emerged in the 1960s when the artist found himself drawn to news reports that revealed the underside of life in a country undergoing rapid change, with thousands of youths moving to cities for jobs that paid poorly despite a rebounding economy.
Tatsumi’s stories were populated by working-class characters whose suffering brings more pain: A factory worker cripples himself to collect insurance, a prostitute ends her relationship with her good-for-nothing father by having sex with him, and a laborer burns down his own house to punish an abusive wife. “I think in almost every way his work is the antithesis of the escapist material that has stereotypically been associated with comic books for generations, and the art form is far richer for it.” “Tatsumi was on the front lines of a movement to take the language of manga (which had previously focused more on action and fantasy) and use it to tell dark, realistic stories about regular people,” Adrian Tomine the cartoonist who serves as Tatsumi’s editor and designer, wrote in an email Friday.
Japanese for “dramatic pictures,” gekiga became a flourishing subgenre of Japanese comics or manga, exploring alienation, sexuality, violence and other mature themes. In that work Tatsumi combined Japanese popular culture after the war with his personal story as a pioneer of the alternative comic style called gekiga.
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