Tegneserie. Delves into the urban underbelly of 1960s Tokyo, exposing not only the seedy dealings of the Japanese everyman but Yoshihiro Tatsumi's maturation as a storyteller. Many of the stories deal with the economic hardships of the time and the strained relationships between men and women, but do so by means of dark allegorical twists and turns
Thirty years before the advent of the literary graphic novel movement in the United States, Yoshihiro Tatsumi created a library of comics that draw parallels to modern prose fiction and today's alternative comics. The stories collected in The Push Man are simultaneously haunting, disturbing, and darkly humorous. A lone man travels the country, projecting pornographic films for private individuals while attempting to maintain a normal home life. The lives of two men become intertwined when one hires the other to observe his sexual escapades through a telescope. An auto mechanic's obsession with a female TV personality turns fatal after a chance meeting between the two
From the mangaka who told his life story in A Drifting Life, and gave you Abandon the Old in Tokyo and The Push Man and Other Stories, comes this collection of gekiga of the 1970s which have never before been translated into English. Personally selected for publication exclusively by Landmark Books by Tatsumi, the stories strip away the gloss of the Japanese Economic Miracle to reveal the stresses, desires and angst of the millions of young people who flocked to the cities where life was not what it was promised to be. Compared to Tatsumi’s earlier stories, this collection paints a much more pessimistic world. The stories run on a different beat. The banality of modern life and its values bleed through.
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.
A NEW COLECTION OF STORIES FROM THE FOREFATHER OF THE JAPANESE LITERARY COMICS MOVEMENT In Fallen Words, Yoshihiro Tatsumi takes up the oral tradition of rakugo and breathes new life into it by shifting the format from spoken word to manga. Each of the eight stories in the collection is lifted from the Edo-era Japanese storytelling form. As Tatsumi notes in the afterword, the world of rakugo, filled with mystery, emotion, revenge, hope, and, of course, love, overlaps perfectly with the world of Gekiga that he has spent the better part of his life developing. These slice-of-life stories resonate with modern readers thanks to their comedic elements and familiarity with human idiosyncrasies. In one, a father finds his son too bookish and arranges for two workers to take the young man to a brothel on the pretext of visiting a new shrine. In another particularly beloved rakugo tale, a married man falls in love with a prostitute. When his wife finds out, she is enraged and sets a curse on the other woman. The prostitute responds by cursing the wife, and the two escalate in a spiral of voodoo doll cursing. Soon both are dead, but even death can't extinguish their jealousy. Tatsumi's love of wordplay shines through in the telling of these whimsical stories, and yet he still offers timeless insight into human nature.
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 Yoshihiro Tatsumi's maturation as a storyteller. Many of the stories deal with the economic hardships of the time and the strained relationships between men and women, but do so by means of dark allegorical twists and turns. A young sewer cleaner's girlfriend has a miscarriage and leaves him when he proves incapable of finding higher-paying work. When a factory worker loses his hand on the job, the parallels between him and his pet monkey prove startling and significant.
What if there were a land where people lived longer than anywhere else on earth, the obesity rate was the lowest in the developed world, and women in their forties still looked like they were in their twenties? Wouldn't you want to know their extraordinary secret? Japanese-born Naomi Moriyama reveals the secret to her own high-energy, successful lifestyle–and the key to the enduring health and beauty of Japanese women–in this exciting new book. The Japanese have the pleasure of eating one of the most delicious, nutritious, and naturally satisfying cuisines in the world without denial, without guilt…and, yes, without getting fat or looking old. As a young girl living in Tokyo, Naomi Moriyama grew up in the food utopia of the world, where fresh, simple, wholesome fare is prized as one of the greatest joys of life. She also spent much time basking in that other great center of Japanese food culture: her mother Chizuko's Tokyo kitchen. Now she brings the traditional secrets of her mother's kitchen to you in a book that embodies the perfect marriage of nature and culinary wisdom–Japanese home-style cooking. If you think you've eaten Japanese food, you haven't tasted anything yet. Japanese home-style cooking isn't just about sushi and raw fish but good, old-fashioned everyday-Japanese-mom's cooking that's stood the test of time–and waistlines–for decades. Reflected in this unique way of cooking are the age-old traditional values of family and the abiding Japanese love of simplicity, nature, and good health. It's the kind of food that millions of Japanese women like Naomi eat every day to stay healthy, slim, and youthful while pursuing an energetic, successful, on-the-go lifestyle. Even better, it's fast, it's easy, and you can start with something as simple as introducing brown rice to your diet. You'll begin feeling the benefits that keep Japanese women among the youngest-looking in the world after your very next meal! If you're tired of counting calories, counting carbs, and counting on being disappointed with diets that don't work and don't satisfy, it's time to discover one of the best-kept and most delicious secrets for a healthier, slimmer, and long-living lifestyle. It's time to discover the Japanese fountain of youth….
Thirteen strangers stranded in an Asian airport spin tales that “outdo Arabian Nights for inventiveness” in this debut novel (The Guardian). Thirteen passengers are stranded at an airport. Tokyo, their destination, is covered in snow and all flights are cancelled. To pass the night they huddle by the baggage carousels and tell each other stories. So begins Tokyo Cancelled, a unique literary adventure that combines a modern landscape with a timeless, fairy-tale ethos. In his delightful debut, Dasgupta brings to life a cast of extraordinary individuals—some lost, some confused, some happy—in a world that remains ineffable, inexplicable, and wonderful. A Ukrainian merchant is led by a wingless bird back to a lost lover; Robert De Niro’s son masters the transubstantiation of matter and turns it against his enemies; a man who manipulates other people’s memories has to confront his own past; a Japanese entrepreneur risks everything in his obsession with a doll; a mute Turkish girl has a strange encounter with a German man who is mapping the world. Told by people on a journey, these stories “tackle themes of transit, dislocation and uprootedness” in a “sprawling, experimental project achieves an exotic luster” (Publishers Weekly).
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.
A hilarious story of one man’s obsession and a brilliant reckoning of a nation’s cultural confusion—from a master Japanese novelist. When twenty-eight-year-old Joji first lays eyes upon the teenage waitress Naomi, he is instantly smitten by her exotic, almost Western appearance. Determined to transform her into the perfect wife and to whisk her away from the seamy underbelly of post-World War I Tokyo, Joji adopts and ultimately marries Naomi, paying for English and music lessons that promise to mold her into his ideal companion. But as she grows older, Joji discovers that Naomi is far from the naïve girl of his fantasies. And, in Tanizaki’s masterpiece of lurid obsession, passion quickly descends into comically helpless masochism.