From A Drifting Life. Published 2009 from Drawn and Quarterly. Copyright 2009 by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. By arrangement with Drawn and Quarterly. All rights reserved.
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From A Drifting Life. Published 2009 from Drawn and Quarterly. Copyright 2009 by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. By arrangement with Drawn and Quarterly. All rights reserved.
From A Drifting Life. Published 2009 from Drawn and Quarterly. Copyright 2009 by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. By arrangement with Drawn and Quarterly. All rights reserved.
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.”
Listen to pronunciations of the Japanese names and words from this story, read aloud by the translator Allison Markin Powell.
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).
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.
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.”
Read the BBC’s short country profile of Japan, or visit nippon.com for the latest news.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For other graphic autobiographies, read:
* For Teaching Idea 1
* For Teaching Idea 1
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:
* For Teaching Idea 2
* For Teaching Idea 3
From A Drifting Life. Published 2009 from Drawn and Quarterly. Copyright 2009 by Yoshihiro Tatsumi. By arrangement with Drawn and Quarterly. All rights reserved.