Abandon the Old in Tokyo

by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Overview

Abandon the Old in Tokyo continues to delve into the urban underbelly of 1960s Tokyo, exposing not only the seedy dealings of the Japanese everyman but Yoshihiro Tatsumi's maturation as a storyteller. Many of the stories deal with the economic hardships of the time and the strained relationships between men and women, but do so by means of dark allegorical twists and turns. A young sewer cleaner's girlfriend has a miscarriage and leaves him when he proves incapable of finding higher-paying work. When a factory worker loses his hand on the job, the parallels between him and his pet monkey prove startling and significant.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770460775
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	04/10/2012
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 8.52(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Born 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 cartoonists and lives in Japan.

Editorial Reviews

The artist's second volume of stories to be published in the US, originally published in Japan in 1970, shows that the graphic visionary was decades ahead of his time. As the anthology's title suggests, Tatsumi (The Push Man and Other Stories, 2005) set these stories in a period of profound transition, both for Tokyo and for comic art, with the old giving way to the new in the 1960s. The artist's response reflects a deep ambivalence, as progress threatens obsolescence for a protagonist who has long catered to the youth comics market and for his ailing mother, whom modern society treats as refuse. Like the "underground comix" of R. Crumb and Gilbert Shelton of the same era, Tatsumi's work opened the comics format to themes that were more mature, often sexual or scatological, and frequently darker than graphic narratives aimed at adolescents. The strength of the illustrations transcends differences in culture and language (the narrative is in English, with graphic signs translated), as Tatsumi depicts the common man-be he a graphic artist or a sewer worker-in the grip of modern forces that he finds complex and confusing. What little humor there is within these seven stories is deadpan, subtle and mostly visual, though there's an irresistible irony in the opening story, "Occupied," in which the protagonist, whose work no longer appeals to kids, finds inspiration in bathroom graffiti, only to get him labeled a pervert in the process. Such a spirit of artistic subversion and self-deprecation sets the tone for the anthology as a whole. Fans of the contemporary graphic narrative won't find this volume of Tatsumi's work dated in the slightest.

Kirkus Reviews