Graphic Novel Friday: Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life

Early next week Drawn and Quarterly releases the Adrian Tomine-designed A Drifting Life, Yoshihiro Tatsumi's sprawling memoir in manga form. The book covers the 15 years from August 1945 to June 1960, from Tatsumi as child of ten in Osaka to his struggle to find his place in the highly competitive post-war Japanese manga market. In simple but unsparing panels, Tatsumi describes not only the setbacks to his career but his fundamental loneliness--a loneliness that seems ameliorated by his immersion in the comics world. Encounters with women are few and far between, and often end in embarrassment or sadness. Woven into the narrative are portraits of his envious brother, his father's financial problems, and a Japan recovering from defeat to forge a new identity still rooted in the past.

Called "the grandfather of Japanese alternative comics," Tatsumi's previous books include The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-bye. The Los Angeles Times Book Review has called his work "remarkable, amazing," with The Village Voice writing, "Starkly beautiful, revelatory, fearless."

These superlatives also apply to A Drifting Life, although perhaps in a more subdued way. Anyone creating a comic, whether autobiographical or not, shapes their story through how they present it, and what they choose to include or leave out, but there's a sense in Tatsumi's account that he's decided to put as little distance between the reader and the events portrayed as possible. As a result, there's great emotional immediacy, but also, sometimes, a fixation on the mundane that leads to the question: "If this wasn't about Tatsumi's life would it be interesting?" That small criticism aside, however, A Drifting Life provides a frank, sometimes heartbreaking look at the life of a creator who has influenced generations of Japanese cartoonists. Once again, the comics form demonstrates that it can encompass not just escapism but real emotional depth.