Graphic Nonfiction by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Translated from the Japanese by Taro Nettleton

Yoshihiro Tatsumi is a renowned manga artist and creator of the realistic, hard-hitting gekiga style. In this excerpt from his graphic autobiography, he describes childhood encounters with bullies and a personal hero.

Navigation

Click the Next button to read the story.

First published in English in Words Without Borders' February 2009 issue: The Graphic World, Part III: (Worth) Ten Thousand Words.

for A Drifting Life
https://wwb-campus.org/literature/from-a-drifting-life

Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Born in Osaka, Japan, in 1935, Yoshihiro Tatsumi began writing and drawing comics for a sophisticated adult readership in a realistic style he called "Gekiga." He has influenced generations of Japanese cartoonists.

Taro Nettleton (translator)

Taro Nettleton is a PhD candidate in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies, the Department of Art and Art History, at the University of Rochester.

Links available online only

Meet Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Watch a trailer for the animated movie Tatsumi, based on Yoshihiro’s life and inspired by his style.

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

Read a short interview with Tatsumi from Publisher’s Weekly, or an even shorter tribute from The Paris Review: “A Very Normal Person.”

Hear the Names

Listen to pronunciations of the Japanese names and words from this story, read aloud by the translator Allison Markin Powell.

For more tips on pronouncing Japanese names and words, use this illustrated guide from wikiHow.com and this explanation of sounds, syllables, and stress from JapanesePod101.com
Visit Japanguide.com to learn how to use Japanese honorifics like the suffix -kun

Read the Original

Take a look at the the original Japanese language version of this memoir: Gekiga hyoryu 1 (劇画漂流上) and Gekiga hyoryu 2 (劇画漂流下).

More of the Story

Read reviews of the book A Drifting Life, including “Manifesto of a Comic-Book Rebel, from The New York Times, and an in-depth review on the blog Shigekuni.

Osamu Tezuka

Learn about the life and influence of Osamu Tezuka, the artist who enters the story on page 10, in “Godfather of Anime, Osamu Tezuka” from the tofugu blog. Scroll down to see video clips of his works.

Then, read another perspective on the importance of Tezuka in "Is Tezuka God?" from Words Without Borders.

Finally, find out why Tezuka was a mentor for Tatsumi in this interview with Japan Times: “Tracing the genealogy of gekiga.”

From Kamishibai to Manga

Find out where you can see kamishibai, or “picture story shows,” today
Watch a kamishibai master, Yassan, perform a story about the childhood of Osamu Tezuka, the cartoonist Hiroshi meets on page 9 (in Japanese, but it's possible to understand the gist from the pictures).

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

Teachers can use Japan Society's Kamishibai resources (including digital Kamishibai and video guides) or the Teacher’s Guide from Kamishibai for Kids.
Then, browse the articles in about.com's Introduction to Anime & Manga

Background on Japan

Read the BBC's short country profile of Japan, or visit nippon.com for the latest news.

Links available online only

More from Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Read "The Birth of Manga," a different excerpt from A Drifting Life, published in The New York Times.

Then, browse through the Yoshihiro Tatsumi author page on Drawn & Quarterly, the publisher of Tatsumi’s work in English.

Or, watch a conversation between Yoshihiro Tatsumi and American cartoonist Adrian Tomine from 2009. At 16:00, they talk about Osamu Tezuka; Tatsumi says of their first two-hour meeting: "I was in complete awe . . . [but] this was when I was most insecure about my ability to be a manga artist and I was sure I could never follow in [his] footsteps . . . "

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

Meet Adrian Tomine

Cartoonist Adrian Tomine discovered Tatsumi as a teenager, and has since helped Tatsumi’s work get translated and published in the United States. Read the Words Without Borders interview with Tomine.

Tomine was also influenced by Tatsumi in his own work, including his collection of personal and emotional graphic short stories Killing and Dying, the last story of which is dedicated to Tatsumi.

A Superhero and a Subway Line

Read about Japan's first superhero, Golden Bat, who appears on page 4 of this story.

In the story, Hiroshi used a map of the Hankyu subway line to find Tezuka's house. Look at a map of the Hankyu line today.

More on Manga

Find out how language in manga has changed over the years in the article “Approaches and Reasons for Looking at Language in Manga" on comicsforum.org.

Also read "More Than Words," an article that compares the power of images and words.

For even more, read Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, with an introduction by Osamu Tezuka.

The Origins of Gekiga

A Drifting Life tells the story of the creation of a type of comic called gekiga. The Japanese title of the book is Gegika hyoryū, which means “A Gekiga Survivor.”

Watch a video in which Tatsumi discusses the beginnings of gekiga.

(Watch the video on YouTube.)

Read a definition of gekiga; or, for an academic perspective from the International Manga Research Center, read “Gekiga as a site of intercultural exchange” (opens as a PDF.)

For more gekiga in English, look at a list on Good Reads.

A Violent Aesthetic

Read “If a person is stabbed they bleed,” an interview in which Yoshihiro Tatsumi discusses the role of violence in his work.

Find out about Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s wartime childhood, relationship with manga artist Osamu Tezuka, and more in an extensive interview translated by Taro Nettleton and published in The Comics Journal. (There are some graphic images of nudity in the reproductions of Tatsumi’s work.)

Translation, Adaptation, and Animation

For an in-depth exploration of the process of editing and translating A Drifting Life, and to learn “how the different reading and comprehension needs of the two audiences have affected the physical, visual, and textual structure of the book,” read the report “Gekiga into English," written by a former intern at Drawn & Quarterly.

Then, read a conversation with Eric Khoo, the director of the animated movie Tatsumi, based on Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s life.

Tatsumi's Legacy

Read a eulogy of Tatsumi, published in The Paris Review and written by the publisher of A Drifting Life, recalling what it was like to work with Tatsumi on the book.

The "Father of Manga"

Read "Tetsu of the Yamanote Line," by Osamu Tezuka aka the "Father of Manga," and published on WWB Campus.

Browse through the extensive collection of Osamu Tezuka's works on the site Tezuka in English, and for a more extensive history, watch the story of his life from the Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum.

After the Bomb: Manga Artists of the Postwar Era

Find out how the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki influenced manga artists like Osamu Tezuka, whose works featured a futuristic Japan and themes of death and rebirth.

Then, find out about other postwar manga influenced by Osamu Tezuka in “Manga and the Bomb,” from Al Jazeera.

Explore the work of the other “greats of postwar manga” mentioned on page 5: Shigeru Mizuki, Goseki Kojima, Sanpei Shirato, and Gojin Ishihara. You can learn about Shigeru Mizuki, who began his career as a picture-storyteller, in the New Yorker profile “Shigeru Mizuki’s War-Haunted Art and Life.”

Then, look through images from Mizuki's Yokai Encyclopedia and browse through the Shigeru archive on cartoon publisher Drawn & Quarterly’s site.

Literary Kin

Read about the parallels between Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Raymond Carver, which the author of this article calls “a melancholy kinship between a master of manga and a master of the short story.”

Mickey Spillane novels were also an important influence on Tatsumi's "adult," gritty, and sometimes graphic style. Read an excerpt from Dead Street, or any other of the many Spillane novels.

More Graphic Literature on the Self*

For other graphic autobiographies, read:

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi
One Hundred Demons, by Lynda Barry
American Splendor, by Harvey Pekar

* For Teaching Idea 1

More Visual Language*

"Sharing," from China, the visual language of which includes recurring images (See that story's Teaching Idea 1 for details)
"The Last of the Bunch," from Egypt, in which wordless images convey characters' emotions (See Teaching Idea 4)
“Proud Beggars,” from Egypt, a graphic representation of a work previously in prose (See Teaching Idea 1)
Also from Egypt, the pamphlet "Two Million People in the Square" uses comic-book effects, similar to those in Tatsumi's story, to issue a call to political action

* For Teaching Idea 1

More Literary Self-Portraits*

Some might say A Drifting Life is a portrait of a (manga) artist as a young man. Read James Joyce’s bildungsroman Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man.

Other bildungsromans include:

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë: Students might compare Jane's initial meeting with Mr. Rochester to the meeting of Hiroshi and Tezuka in "A Drifting Life."
Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens (1861)
Of Human Bondage, by W. Somerset Maugham (1915)

* For Teaching Idea 2

More Drifting Lives (and a few trapped characters)*

Poetry: Audre Lorde's "Hanging Fire" depicts a trapped and drifting adolescence
Short story: "The Trapped Boy," also on this site, is about a bullied boy who may have lost his mind
Plays: Nora Helmer, the housewife in Ibsen's A Doll's House is at once trapped and drifting, as is Laura Wingfield of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie
Novels: Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (also translated as Fathers and Children); Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club; Janie Crawford in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

* For Teaching Idea 3

Reading Grade Level(s): 3, 4, 5 and up

1. Visual Language
2. Portrait of the Manga Artist as a Young Man
3. A Drifting Life, A Trapped Boy

To access these Teaching Ideas, please register or login to WWB-Campus.

Related Reading

Tetsu of the Yamanote Line - Graphic Fiction