Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the Man Who Helped Manga Grow Up

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, widely considered a pioneer who helped bring manga out of the nursery and into the realm of adult literature, died March 7 at the age of 79. He one of the first manga creators whose work was translated into English, and his collection of short stories, The Push Man, was influential in creating a market for literary manga in North America. There’s no telling where the genre would be without him, and if you’ve never explored his work, now is the perfect time.
Tatsumi was born in 1935 and grew up in Osaka. An avid reader of manga, including the work of influential master Osamu Tezuka, he started drawing his own comics and sending them in to magazines at the age of 12. After winning a cash prize, he realized that manga could be a paying profession, and in his teens, he began working on longer, more ambitious works. Osamu Tezuka lived nearby, and after the two met at a publisher’s office, Tatsumi started visiting the older manga-ka for critiques of his work.

At that time, comics were regarded as a children’s medium, but in the postwar years a new market emerged: manga rental shops, catering to adults as well as children. Rental manga were action-filled pulp tales published in small runs with minimal editing. Tatsumi found this parallel publishing world to be a grand outlet for his storytelling, which was often inspired by his love of movies (his early graphic novel Black Blizzard is basically a manga re-imagining of a noir film). In 1957, Tatsumi coined the term “gekiga,” or “dramatic pictures,” (as opposed to “manga,” which means “whimsical pictures”) to describe the sorts of stories he wanted to tell. The term was soon adopted by a whole cohort of artists, and when the rental market collapsed, they went on to publish their work in magazines, including the influential alt-manga publication Garo.
Tatsumi continued to grow as an artist and make manga in a variety of styles and genres throughout his life. He was a publisher himself from 1963 to 1971 and, later in life, owned a used manga shop. His work began appearing outside of Japan in the early 1980s, first translated into French and Spanish. In 1987, when the English-language manga boom was just getting under way, Catalan Communications published an English edition of his Good-Bye and Other Stories. In the introduction to The Push Man, editor Adrian Tomine (himself a comics creator) talks about how that book, “not only re-ignited my passion for comics, but made very clear to me the now-commonplace fact that comics were simply a medium, just as capable of expressing personal, artistic stories for adults as they were of indulging childhood fantasy.”  Tatsumi, it seems, had opened up the comics medium for Tomine in the same way he had for a generation of Japanese readers. Even today, his work seems closer to that of, say, Love and Rockets creators Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, than to the genre work that makes up the majority of licensed manga.
Manga scholar Ryan Holmberg has written an impressive obituary for The Comics Journal that covers Tatsumi’s entire career. As useful as it is for context, the greatest praise one can give his work is this: although created in a different time and place, it stands solidly on its own as graphic literature.

The Push Man and Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, Good-Bye
These three short story collections, the first of Tatsumi’s to appear in English, were created between 1969 and 1972. The first group of stories, collected in The Push Man, were done for an adult magazine; the pay was paltry, he told Gary Groth in a 2007 interview, but he had a good editor and a lot of creative freedom. The magazine featured longer erotic stories in the front, and Tatsumi considered his stories as a counterpoint: “In those works… the women were passive, and the men would dominate over the women. So to do the opposite, I thought, would create interest in the readership.” One of the more noticeable characteristics of these stories—the taciturn men—actually resulted from a suggestion from his editor, who asked Tatsumi to eliminate some of the word balloons to keep the panels from looking too crowded. it became one of the signature elements of his early stories.
Taken together, these dark tales of the everyday lives of working people in a big city are emotionally bleak, and sometimes horrifying. In The Push Man, which dates from 1969, the stories are tiny domestic tragedies, most just eight pages long, but by Good-Bye, published but three years later, they have expanded in length and scope, and several deal directly with the world of Japan after the war. Most notable in the latter book is “Hell,” a story about a photographer sent to Hiroshima after the bombing who captures what he thinks is an evocative image—then finds out things are not as they seemed.

A Drifting Life
Tatsumi’s massive, 840-page autobiographical work has less a grim, less misanthropic tone than his short stories. He doesn’t shy away from the harsh side of postwar life, but he balances it with tales of his own youthful enthusiasm—and his early success as a manga creator. Although the names have been changed, this is a pretty straightforward narration of Tatsumi’s experiences from 1945 to 1960, including his family’s financial troubles, his brother’s poor health, and his rising trajectory in the industry, beginning with his childhood success in manga competitions. It’s a bit episodic, which is probably a good thing in a book this length, and for a manga reader, his accounts of his visits with Osamu Tezuka and the insider view of the industry’s early days are utterly fascinating.

Fallen Words
Though Tezuka encouraged Tatsumi to abandon short stories for full-length narratives, there’s no question that he is best known in the U.S. for his short stories. This career bookending collection stands as the opposite of The Push Man: the stories still have an urban setting, but the historical period is earlier and the tone is lighthearted. Where his eight-pagers had sharp story arcs, these tales of travelers and inns, oiran (courtesans), wandering husbands, jealous wives, and one amazingly bratty child are rambling shaggy dog tales. Based on the oral storytelling tradition of rakuga (literally, “fallen words”), they are designed to hold an audience that is listening, not reading. Most use repeated motifs—in one story, a beleaguered brothel worker must go from room to room, explaining to each of the customers why the oiran hasn’t arrived yet, while in another, a series of men discuss what they would do if they won a lottery. There are plenty of twists to keep you wondering what will happen next, even if most of the stories don’t have a big payoff—the pleasure is in the experience of reading more than the satisfaction of the ending.