A Drifting Life

by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

I'd wanted to read this for a while now, and was even more interested in checking it out after I read The Push Man a little while ago.  As this is such a huge book (834 pages), it's taken me a while to read it, and it has only been since I started it that the Japanese earthquake, with all its attendant destruction and threat of nuclear catastrophe, took place.

I'm sure that this coloured my reading of this book quite a bit.  Tatsumi crafted A Drifting Life to be basically a memoir of his early life, outlining how he broke in to manga, his relationships with publishers and other artists, and how he grew frustrated with the constraints of the art form, and created his own 'gekiga' movement.  Tatsumi also uses the book to show us how Japan recovered from the war, and chronicles the various cultural influences, from American and French films to Japanese pop artists that affected his mindstate and work.

This massive book is incredible, even if for long stretches of time it seems that we are reading the same conversations over and over again, as Hiroshi Katsumi (Tatsumi's alter ego) is subtly manipulated by his publishers, or argues with his brother.  The brother, Okimasa, is an interesting character.  When Hiroshi is younger, Okimasa is frequently ill and a tyrant.  As his health improves, and he enters the manga world as well, he seems to vacillate between being a supportive friend and Hiroshi's harshest critic.

Having not read much manga, I found the perspective that this book takes, demonstrating both the business aspect and the the desire among some artists to have it viewed as an art form, to be fascinating.  I feel like I learned a lot reading this book, but I also really enjoyed watching Hiroshi grow from a boy submitting four-panel strips on postcards to his favourite magazines, to basically creating a new genre of manga.  I am definitely interested in reading more of Tatsumi's work.