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Drawn & Quarterly Adds Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Fallen Words Manga

The North American comic publisher Drawn and Quarterly confirmed with ANN on Monday that it will release Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Fallen Words manga in May 2012.

Amazon's listing of Fallen Words describes the book as follows:

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.

These slice-of-life stories resonate with modern readers thanks to their comedic elements and familiarity with human idiosyncrasies. In one, a father finds his son too bookish and arranges for two workers to take the young man to a brothel on the pretext of visiting a new shrine. In another particularly beloved rakugo tale, a married man falls in love with a prostitute. When his wife finds out, she is enraged and sets a curse on the other woman. The prostitute responds by cursing the wife, and the two escalate in a spiral of voodoo doll cursing. Soon both are dead, but even death can't extinguish their jealousy.

Tatsumi's love of wordplay shines through in the telling of these whimsical stories, and yet he still offers timeless insight into human nature.

Drawn and Quarterly has previously released Tatsumi's Abandon the Old in Tokyo, The Push Man and Other Stories, Good-Bye, Black Blizzard, and A Drifting Life manga.

Drawn and Quarterly also confirmed with ANN that it will release Shigeru Mizuki's (GeGeGe no Kitarō) NonNonBâ manga in March 2012. Drawn and Quarterly had announced that it licensed the manga in 2010.

Mizuki drew upon his life to create NonNonBâ, a story about a boy in the 1930s who is introduced to the world of Japanese folklore by a old neighbor woman. The manga won the award for "Best Comic Book" at the largest Comic Festival in Europe, the Angoulême International Comics Festival, in 2007.

Drawn and Quarterly previously released Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths manga earlier this year.

Drawn and Quarterly also confirmed with ANN that it will not release Imiri Sakabashira's Working Kappa book. Drawn and Quarterly told ANN that the book had been cancelled. The company had previously released Sakabashira's The Box Man book.

Update: Thanks to animeresearch for the news tip.