Yoshihiro Tatsumi

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Yoshihiro Tatsumi 辰巳 ヨシヒロ
Tatsumi in 2010
Born	(1935-06-10)June 10, 1935 Tennōji-ku, Osaka, Japan
Died	March 7, 2015(2015-03-07) (aged 79) Tokyo, Japan
Nationality	Japanese
Area(s)	Cartoonist, Writer, Artist, Publisher
Notable works	Children's Island Black Blizzard The Push Man and Other Stories Abandon the Old in Tokyo Good-Bye Eisner Award x2 (2010) Regards sur le Monde Award (2012)

Yoshihiro Tatsumi (辰巳 ヨシヒロ, Tatsumi Yoshihiro, June 10, 1935 – March 7, 2015) was a Japanese

Another well-known manga artist, Noboru Ōshiro [ja], also gave Tatsumi feedback and advice. Ōshiro later asked to redraw and publish Tatsumi's immature work Happily Adrift, but did not end up doing so.^{[citation needed]} Ōshiro offered Hiroshi a chance to live at his home "dojo" with other aspiring manga artists, but Tatsumi postponed the offer until he graduated from high school. One of the members of Ōshiro's dojo showed Tatsumi's Children's Island to the publisher Tsuru Shobō, which ended up publishing it in 1954.

Tatsumi eventually attended college instead of apprenticing with Ōshiro, studying for entrance exams, but purposefully didn't finish the exam.^{[citation needed]} He met with the publisher Kenbunsha, which commissioned him to create a detective story similar to the fictional French thief Arsène Lupin, but the company reduced its payment offer so instead he published Thirteen Eyes with Hinomaru Bunko [ja], with whom he would go on to publish many works. At this point, Tatsumi embarked on a three-year period of producing manga for the rental book market; during this period he produced seventeen book-length manga and several volumes of short stories.^[3][4]

Shadow and "anti-manga manga"

Hinomaru Bunko's editor established a new monthly collection with its top authors titled Shadow (影, Kage). Although influenced by Tezuka's cinematic style, Tatsumi and his colleagues were not interested in making comics for children. They wanted to make comics for adults that were more graphic and showed more violence.^[5][6] Tatsumi explained, "Part of that was influenced by the newspaper stories I would read. I would have an emotional reaction of some kind and want to express that in my comics."^[5] In short, Tatsumi aspired to create an "anti-manga manga", against his friendly rival and colleague Masahiko Matsumoto. Some of Tatsumi's first "anti-manga" mangas were published in Shadow.

Because Shadow was reducing its artists' output, however, Hinomaru asked his authors to also work on full-length stories. Tatsumi yearned to do such a story,^[7] and he pitched the idea of adapting Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo into a ten-volume Japanese period piece, but his boss did not feel he was skilled enough or had enough time.^[8]

The publisher put Tatsumi, Matsumoto, Takao Saito, and Kuroda in a "manga camp," an apartment in Tennōji-ku, Osaka. After his brother Okimasa's hospitalization, however, the 21-year-old Hiroshi left the "manga camp." Back home, he experienced a burst of creativity^[9] and created the manga he wanted to, titled Black Blizzard. Black Blizzard was created during a boom in short story magazines, so Tatsumi tried to come up with new forms of expression, such as conveying movement realistically, though his art was rough and used a lot of diagonal lines.^[10] Published in November 1956, Black Blizzard was well received by Hiroshi's fellow authors,^[11] with Masaki Sato (佐藤まさあき) calling it "the manga of the future".^[12][13]

Gekiga

In 1957, Tatsumi coined the term gekiga to differentiate his work from the more common term manga, or "whimsical pictures." Other names he considered include katsudōga and katsuga, both derived from katsudō eiga or "moving pictures," an early term for films, showing the movement's cinematic influence.^[14] Tatsumi's work "Yūrei Taxi" was the first to be called gekiga when it was published at the end of 1957.^[15]

In 1959, the Gekiga Kōbō (劇画工房) formed in Tokyo with eight members including Tatsumi, Matsumoto and Takao Saito.^[4] The group wrote a sort of "Gekiga Manifesto" that was sent to various publishers and newspapers declaring their mission.^[3][15]

Some authors use the term gekiga to describe works that only have shock factor. In 1968, Tatsumi published Gekiga College because he felt gekiga was straying too far from its roots and wanted to reclaim its meaning.^[6] In 2009, he said "Gekiga is a term people throw around now to describe any manga with violence or eroticism or any spectacle. It's become synonymous with spectacular. But I write manga about households and conversations, love affairs, mundane stuff that is not spectacular. I think that's the difference."^[16]

The monthly magazine Garo, devoted to publishing gekiga, was founded in 1964. Tatsumi and other influential gekiga artists contributed to Garo.

Work of the late 1960s and early 1970s

In the late 1960s, Tatsumi worked on a series of stories which were serialized in the manga magazine Gekiga Young as well as in self-published

In 1970, Tatsumi published a number of stories that, according to him, "marked a breakthrough and rekindled [his] passion in gekiga".

In 1971 and 1972, Tatsumi transitioned from

Later work

Tatsumi spent 11 years working on A Drifting Life (劇画漂流, Gekiga Hyōryū),^[21] a thinly veiled autobiographical manga that chronicled his life from 1945 to 1960, the early stages of his career as a cartoonist. It was released in Japan as two bound volumes on November 20, 2008,^[22][23] and published as an 840-page single volume by Drawn & Quarterly in 2009.^[21] The book earned Tatsumi the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, and won two Eisner Awards.

One of Tatsumi's last major works was Fallen Words (劇画寄席 芝浜, Gekiga Yose: Shibahama), a collection of rakugo short stories published in 2009 by Basilico. Rakugo (literally "Fallen Words") is a form of storytelling where the stories are retold for generations, unlike manga, and are humorous as opposed to gekiga, which drew Tatsumi to adapt the stories. Tatsumi attempted to combine the humor of the stories with the visual language of gekiga, two forms which he thought were incompatible, but he later realized that they both rely strongly on timing and that rakugo has much more depth and variety, forcing him to reevaluate the form and see that it was closer to gekiga than he thought.^[24] Publishers Weekly complimented the humor and relatable nature of the fables, concluding that Tatsumi's "flat yet expressive drawings" help move the stories smoothly.^[25] Garrett Martin of Paste called the manga "a slight work, but fascinating as a historical and cultural artifact", comparing it to as if Robert Crumb adapted traditional folk songs.^[26]

Death

Tatsumi died of cancer at the age of 79 on March 7, 2015.^[27][28]

Legacy

His work has been translated into many languages, and Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly took part in a project to publish an annual compendium of his works focusing each on the highlights of one year of his work (beginning with 1969) that produced three volumes, edited by American cartoonist Adrian Tomine. According to Tomine, this is one event in a seemingly coincidental rise to worldwide popularity along with: reissued collections of his stories in Japan, acquisition of translation rights in a number of European countries, and competition for the rights for Drawn & Quarterly.^[29]

A full-length animated feature on the life and short stories of Yoshihiro Tatsumi was released in 2011. The film, Tatsumi, is directed by Eric Khoo and The Match Factory handled world sales.^[30]

Awards

Tatsumi received the

• Children's Island (Tsuru Shobō, 1954)[31]
• Thirteen Eyes (Hinomaru Bunko, 1954)
• The Man who Laughs in the Darkness (Hinomaru Bunko, 1955)
• "The People of the Valley Inn," in Shadow #2 (Hinomaru Bunko, 1956)
• "It Happened One Night," in Shadow #4 (Hinomaru Bunko, July 1956)
• Black Blizzard (Hinomaru Bunko, Nov. 1956)
• "Yūrei Taxi" ("Ghost Taxi"), in Machi ("The Street") (1958) — first published use of the term Gekiga^[32]
• "A Handshake in the Graveyard," in Secret Room #1 (Nakamura Shoten, 1960–61)
• Dynamic Action (Sanyōsha, 1961)
• Tatsumi Yoshihiro Action (Sanyōsha, 1961)
• "The Graveyard of the Sea," Gekiga Magazine #1 (Satō Pro, 1963)
• Gekiga College (Hiro Shobō, 1968) — a manifesto
• Hitokui zakana ("A Little Rough") (Napoleon Books, 1970)
• Hitokuigyo ("Man-Eating Fish") (Hiro Shobō, 1973)
  OCLC 673412591
• Turkish Bath Bastard (Geibunsha, 1978)
• The Army of Hell (Jigoku no gundan, 1982–83)
• Shoot the Sun (Taiyō o ute, early-mid-1980s)[31]
• Fallen Words (Basilico, 2009)
• Gekiga Living (Gekiga kurashi, 2010) — prose

English publications

• Good-Bye and Other Stories (
  ISBN 978-0-87416-056-7
  — short stories originally published in Japan in 1970–1971
• The Push Man and Other Stories (Drawn & Quarterly, 2005) — short stories originally published in Japan in 1969
• ISBN 978-1-894937-87-0
  — short stories originally published in Japan in 1970
• ISBN 978-1-897299-37-1
  — new translation of short stories originally published in Japan in 1970–1971
• A Drifting Life (Drawn & Quarterly, 2009) — originally published in Japan in 2008
• Black Blizzard (Drawn & Quarterly, 2010) — originally published in Japan in 1956
• "Love's Bride" in the anthology
  AX: alternative manga, edited by Sean Michael Wilson (Top Shelf Productions
  , 2010)
• ISBN 9781770460744
• Midnight Fishermen (Landmark Books, 2013)
  ISBN 9789814189385