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A review by xterminal
A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
4.0
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, A Drifting Life (Drawn and Quarterly, 2009)
Despite my loathing of memoirs, every once in a while one comes along I can't not read. And while Yoshihiro Tatsumi's monstrous A Drifting Life is not, in the strictest sense, a memoir, by all accounts this “autobiographical fiction” is truer to Tatsumi's early years in the comics industry than are most memoirs. At over 850 pages, it's also Tatsumi's most ambitious work. Despite the usual scope of Tatsumi's material, it's also in many ways his most dreary.
As we open, it's the 1950s in Japan. The war is over, but economic distress is still everywhere, and Japan's youth feel rootless. Among them is Hiroshi Katsumi, a student who has no real idea what he wants to do with his life (hence the title). He, his brother, and his friends find release in drawing four-panel gag manga to send in for contests; things get interesting when both Hiroshi and his brother start winning. The normal brotherly rivalry between the two develops into something fierce, but there's no mistaking Hiroshi as the real talent in the family; soon he's off to work in a stable of mangaka working for rental companies, but still, Hiroshi is disaffected. He wants to do something new with the genre, and a cadre of his stablemates feel the same disaffectedness. Then, one day, during one of their endless discussions on the subject, one of them mentions the term gekiga...
This is not Tatsumi for beginners. Not just because of its length, but because this is very different from Tatsumi's usual work. I see comparisons to Bukowski in many reviews of the Tatsumi work so far published in English, and those comparisons are warranted in the short works. Not so here; Tatsumi's approach is more “pure Japanese” than that. Much of the first half of the book is about Hiroshi's hero worship of Osamu Tezuka, and there is a very Tezuka feel about the whole thing (though filtered through Tatsumi's own rootlessness and existential crises; one could never mistake this for Ode to Kirihito). Yet still, it is unmistakably Tatsumi in the same way that, for example, Thomas Wolfe is unmistakably Thomas Wolfe despite the constant echoes of Dylan Thomas and Marcel Proust. Start with the shorter work and come to this once you have developed a taste for Tatsumi's broad style and blacker-than-black humor. But you will want to get here eventually. Tatsumi has no real match in western graphic novels, though given the depth and gravity of his subject matter, I want to compare him to Alan Moore, but without stuff blowing up. In any case, comparisons are meaningless. You want to read Yoshihiro Tatsumi. ****
Despite my loathing of memoirs, every once in a while one comes along I can't not read. And while Yoshihiro Tatsumi's monstrous A Drifting Life is not, in the strictest sense, a memoir, by all accounts this “autobiographical fiction” is truer to Tatsumi's early years in the comics industry than are most memoirs. At over 850 pages, it's also Tatsumi's most ambitious work. Despite the usual scope of Tatsumi's material, it's also in many ways his most dreary.
As we open, it's the 1950s in Japan. The war is over, but economic distress is still everywhere, and Japan's youth feel rootless. Among them is Hiroshi Katsumi, a student who has no real idea what he wants to do with his life (hence the title). He, his brother, and his friends find release in drawing four-panel gag manga to send in for contests; things get interesting when both Hiroshi and his brother start winning. The normal brotherly rivalry between the two develops into something fierce, but there's no mistaking Hiroshi as the real talent in the family; soon he's off to work in a stable of mangaka working for rental companies, but still, Hiroshi is disaffected. He wants to do something new with the genre, and a cadre of his stablemates feel the same disaffectedness. Then, one day, during one of their endless discussions on the subject, one of them mentions the term gekiga...
This is not Tatsumi for beginners. Not just because of its length, but because this is very different from Tatsumi's usual work. I see comparisons to Bukowski in many reviews of the Tatsumi work so far published in English, and those comparisons are warranted in the short works. Not so here; Tatsumi's approach is more “pure Japanese” than that. Much of the first half of the book is about Hiroshi's hero worship of Osamu Tezuka, and there is a very Tezuka feel about the whole thing (though filtered through Tatsumi's own rootlessness and existential crises; one could never mistake this for Ode to Kirihito). Yet still, it is unmistakably Tatsumi in the same way that, for example, Thomas Wolfe is unmistakably Thomas Wolfe despite the constant echoes of Dylan Thomas and Marcel Proust. Start with the shorter work and come to this once you have developed a taste for Tatsumi's broad style and blacker-than-black humor. But you will want to get here eventually. Tatsumi has no real match in western graphic novels, though given the depth and gravity of his subject matter, I want to compare him to Alan Moore, but without stuff blowing up. In any case, comparisons are meaningless. You want to read Yoshihiro Tatsumi. ****