A Drifting Life

We need a new word: künstler-comic? Well, maybe not. Yoshihiro Tatsumi's account of his journey from schoolboy cartoons to the center of the Japanese manga industry during its heyday is a fascinating account of the artist as a young man. In it, with the consummate artistry we have come to expect, thanks to Drawn & Quarterly's ongoing edition of his work, Tatsumi lets us know what it was like to work as a manga-ka in the 1950s and 60s, and also how his country and the world changed during that time. The young artist who is Tatsumi's stand-in often voices his frustration at being unable, due to economic constraints, to work on long-form comics. In A Drifting Life Tatsumi, over 834 pages, is able to stretch out and do just that. Having turned the last of those many pages one is hungry for more. "I've drifted along, demanding an endless dream from gekiga," Tatsumi concludes his masterpiece, "And I . . . probably . . . always will" (ellipses in the original). Dream on, Mr. Tatsumi.