Just picked this up along with Abandon The Old In Tokyo the other day. I had completely no knowledge of Tatsumi prior to reading this. The cover looked interesting enough to me, and at that moment I had some sort of a craving for Japanese-based literature. This book took me by surprise and was completely different from what I expected.
The Push Man and other stories is a compilation of stories done by Yoshiro Tatsumi in 1969 , brought over to the Western world with the help of editor Adrian Tomine and Drawn and Quarterly.
Tatsumi is widely regarded as the father of modern gekiga (劇画), or “dramatic pictures”. It’s different from regular manga in a sense that it’s targeted toward more mature audiences with consistent adult-based themes. It’s like how graphic novels relate to comics in the western world, where the former is more for adults and the latter – children. The book consists of 16 short stories. By short I mean really short, most of them are 8 pages in length. Thogh succinct and short, the stories in most cases manage to get the idea to the reader. All of the stories center around working class individuals living in Tokyo going through their daily jobs, It provides a brief perspective some jobs that you never knew existed. Some of these stories have underlying themes and meaning behind them . Unfortunately even for my standards, I wasn’t able to understand some of them as how the author had originally intended them to be. Only two of the stories in the book, Who are you? and My Hitler break the 8 page conformity and go well into 20 pages, providing more dialogue and engagement.
The only qualm I had with this book is that it was presented in a Western way where the panels run from left-to-right instead of the traditional Japanese way. That was how the book was originally created and intended to be appreciated, though it might seem like it wouldn’t make an effect, some of the panels had to be re-arranged by Tatsumi for this re-release so that it would make more “sense” in the new orientation. Another thing is that most of these stories usually deal with problems relating to sexual frustration (most of the time) and the woes of the working class in Tokyo. If I was ill informed or a woman, I would have thought Tatsumi to be misogynistic himself, though he later clarifies at the end of the book that these stories are no indication of how he is like as person. The stories usually end of with the woman dead, beaten or killed – if not, the man being abandoned and in a dire state. Another interesting to point out is that all the protagonists in the story are male. Tatsumi did state that he was going through a lot of debt and problems in that point in his life, it was at his point before his career really lifted off. Maybe that’s why he made such grim and witty stories.
It’s really quite hard to describe unless you read them, the storytelling is masterful, gripping and concise. The artwork on the other hand is well-done and really clean, albeit the constant usage of a similar looking and rather expressionless protagonist in every story. Come to think of it, all of his protagonists did have that sort of look of despair. Also, this is actually a compilation of his works in 1969, his first year of work. Which is still pretty good stuff considering it’s more than 40 years old. I’m really looking forward to reading Abandon The Old in Tokyo. For people who want to try something different from the regular graphic novel and have a slight interest in Japanese artwork or literature, give this a go and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
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