DRAWN & QUARTERLY

Abandon the Old in Tokyo delves into the urban underbelly of 1960s Tokyo, exposing not only the seedy dealings of the Japanese everyman but Yoshihiro Tatsumi's maturation as a storywriter. 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.

Susumu Yamaji, a 24-year-old pianist, is arrested for murder and ends up handcuffed to a career criminal on the train that will take them to prison. An avalanche derails the train and the criminal takes the opportunity to escape, dragging a reluctant Susumu with him into the blizzard raging outside. They flee into the mountains to an abandoned ranger station, where they take shelter from the storm. As they sit around the fire they built, Susumu relates how love drove him to become a murderer. Black Blizzard uncovers an unlikely love story and an even unlikelier friendship.

Enter the strange world of Imiri Sakabashira, whose denizens are zoomorphic creatures that emerge from one another as well as their equally bizarre environs. The Box Man follows its protagonists along a scooter trip through a complex landscape that oscillates between a dense city, a countryside simplified to near abstraction, and hybrids of the two; the theme of hybridity permeates throughout.

Spanning fifteen years from August of 1945 to June of 1960, Tatsumi's stand-in protagonist, Hiroshi, faces his father's financial burdens and his parents' failing marriage, his jealous brother's deteriorating health, and the innumerable pitfalls that await him in the competitive manga market of mid-twentieth-century Japan. He dreams of following in the considerable footsteps of his idol, manga artist Osamu Tezuka - with whom Tatsumi eventually became peers and, at times, stylistic rivals.

In Fallen Words, Yoshihiro Tatsumi takes up the oral tradition of rakugo and breathes new life into it by shifting the format from spoken word to manga. Each of the eight stories in the collection is lifted from the Edo-era Japanese storytelling form. As Tatsumi notes in the afterword, the world of rakugo, filled with mystery, emotion, revenge, hope, and of course, love, overlaps perfectly with the world of gekiga that he has spent the better part of his life developing.

Drawn in 1971 and 1972, these stories expand Yoshihiro Tatsumi's vocabulary for characters contextualized by themes of depravity and disorientation in twentieth-century Japan. Some of the tales focus on the devastation the country felt as a result of World War II, and, while American influence does play a role in the disturbing and bizarre stories contained within this volume, as always, it is Tatsumi's characters that bear his hallmark, muddling through isolated despair and fleeting pleasure to live out their darkly nuanced lives.

Within the pages of NonNonBa, Mizuki explores the legacy left him by his childhood explorations of the spirit world, explorations encouraged by his grandmother, a grumpy old woman named NonNonBa.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is a semi-autobiographical account of the desperate final weeks of a Japanese infantry unit at the end of World War II. The soldiers were told that they must go into battle and die for the honor of their country, with certain execution facing them if they returned alive. Mizuki was a soldier himself, and he uses his experiences to convey the devastating consequences and moral depravity of the war.

Thirty years before the advent of the literary graphic novel movement in the United States, Yoshihiro Tatsumi created a library of comics that draws parallels to modern prose fiction and today's alternative comics. The stories collected in The Push Man are simultaneously haunting, disturbing, and darkly humorous.

The early 1970s. Uninvolved with the political movements of the time, Ichiro and Sachiko hope for something better, but they're no revolutionaries; their spare time is spent drinking, smoking, daydreaming, and sleeping - usually together and at times with others. While Ichiro attempts to make a living from his comics, Sachiko's parents are eager to arrange a marriage for her, but Ichiro doesn't seem interested. Both in their relationship and at work, Ichiro and Sachiko are unable to say the things they need to say, ultimately communicating as much with their body language and what remains unsaid as with words.

It is the pre-modern Japanese countryside of Susumu Katsumata's youth, a slightly magical world where ancestral traditions hold sway over a people in the full vigor of life, struggling to survive the harsh seasons and the difficult life of manual laborers and farmers. While the world they inhabit has faded into memory and myth, the universal fundamental emotions of the human heart prevail at the center of these tender stories.

In this collection of hauntingly elliptical short stories, Oji Suzuki explores memory, relationships and loss with a loose narrative style, filling each tale with a sense of unfulfilled longing. He plumbs the dissolute depths of human psychology, literally bathing his characters in expansive shadows that paradoxically reveal as much as they obscure.