1970s Japan
A01=Taro Nettleton
A01=Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Author_Taro Nettleton
Author_Yoshihiro Tatsumi
autobiographical comic
Category=XAM
classic
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_graphic-novels-manga
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
garo
gekiga
insider history
manga
memoir
Osama Tezuka
pioneer
Shigeru Mizuki
Yoshiharu Tsuge
Product details
- ISBN 9781770468139
- Dimensions: 165 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 18 Nov 2025
- Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
- Publication City/Country: CA
- Product Form: Paperback
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The award-winning memoir translated by Taro Nettleton with a new design by Adrian Tomine. In this memoir that won two Eisner Awards, the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, a prize at the Festival de la BD d'Angouleme, and was adapted into a feature film that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, legendary manga-ka Yoshihiro Tatsumi uses his life long obsession with comics as a framework to tell his life story incisively and unflinchingly. He deftly weaves a complex story that encompasses Japanese culture and history, family dynamics, first love, the intricacies of the manga industry, and most importantly, what it means to be an artist. Alternately humorous, enlightening, and haunting, A Drifting Life is the masterful summation of a fascinating life and a historic career. Over sixty years ago, Yoshihiro Tatsumi expanded the horizons of comics storytelling by using the visual language of manga to tell gritty, dark, literary stories about the private lives of everyday people, a genre he coined 'gekiga' in order to differentiate his comics from mainstream manga. His comics appeared in the legendary Japanese comics magazine GARO, and he became the first of his GARO peers to have his work published in English in the graphic novel era. A Drifting Life is Tatsumi s most ambitious, personal, and heart-felt work and considered to be one of the defining autobiographical works of the comics medium.
Born in 1935, Yoshihiro Tatsumi began writing and drawing comics for a sophisticated adult readership in a realistic style he called Gekiga. He has influenced generations of cartoonists and lives in Japan.
