A Drifting Life
10/10, would read again. An excellent autobiographical work that details Yoshihiro Tatsumi's career as a manga artist. The best part about it is that not only does the book cover the early developments of the manga industry, but there is a strong narrative of a man who is struggling to evolve the medium to a higher level of storytelling while facing the harsh realities of the manga business.
One of the interesting parts is seeing how the early manga business model worked. Most of the book focused exclusively on the book rental system which I assumed where Tatsumi published most of his earlier works. It seemed so disorganized, focused a lot on publishing huge amount of shorter stories, and authors seemed to have a lot of freedom to work with multiple publishers. There was also a push for collections of short 20-30 pages works which I'd imagine is the reason why most of Tatsumi's manga available in English are largely short stories. He did struggle a lot trying to come up with longer pieces, but throughout the whole book he never really published a long 200 pages story.
The major point of Tatsumi's life is obviously when he coined the term "gekiga" to describe his work to get away from the traditional children targeted manga that were popular at the time. Most of his influences were from films and it did lead to some cool discussions with other manga artists about panels usage and layout. Do you waste a lot of panels showing action scenes and setting the mood, or do you abridge the action and just show the key scenes? This was also one of the best parts of the manga, reading all these discussions by artists about storytelling in the manga format and how you advance it and evolve it. Plus it was cool trying to see if I can recognize any of them. I didn't even know the Golgo 13 author was a friend of Tatsumi and they worked together and collaborated a lot.
Ultimately the question is how much influence did he have on the industry? The problem is that the book never really addressed that point. It focused mostly on his earlier career and right to 1-2 years after he started the gekiga movement. I mean he did partially contribute to the boom of the short story magazines with Shadow and City magazines, but it was never shown how his art influenced other manga artists. The Wikipedia page does mention how even Tezuka was influenced by Tatsumi which is a bit amusing seeing how Tatsumi as a child always looked up to Tezuka and tried to imitate his techniques. I did want to see more of his influence, but sadly the book did end right around the 1960s. I think it's also around the time right before he wrote most of the short stories that are translated in English like Push Man or Goodbye. It did make sense seeing how near the end he realized that gekiga was missing the anger element. Also, the epilogue was just damn amazing, summed up his life perfectly.
