【China Archives】
A Very Normal Person
From the Archive
Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Tokyo noir.
From the cover of our Spring 2006 issue: detail from “My Darling Monkey.”
Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who created a dark, noirish style of Japanese manga he called gekiga, meaning “dramatic pictures,” died last week at seventy-nine. We featured a portfolio of Tatsumi’s work in our Spring 2006 issue. “Tatsumi’s gekiga,” the editors wrote,
is distinguished by its discordant placement of flat, almost crudely sketched ordinary characters within gritty, naturalistic backgrounds. The drawings alternate between impressions of mundane daily life and images of surprising violence and sex, conveying a sense of individual alienation within the rapidly changing throng of postwar Japanese society.
[…] In tone and style, Tatsumi’s gekiga shares an obvious kinship with the “alternative” or “literary” comics that began proliferating in North America in the mid-1980s—yet it predates that work by as much as three decades. The stories from which the images in these pages were selected are all set in Tokyo in the 1960s.
[…] When asked whether he wanted to say anything to English-language readers coming to his work for the first time, he said: “I myself am a very normal person. Please do not interpret these stories as representative of the author’s personality.”
Below, in memory of Tatsumi, are a few excerpts from that portfolio.
A page from “The Washer.”
A page from “Forked Road.”
The title page of “Unpaid.”
Dan Piepenbring is the Web editor of The Paris Review.
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