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REVIEW: A Drifting Life GN

This is Tatsumi's sequential art memoir, but for reasons left largely to the imagination of the reader, he has cast himself as the semi-fictionalized “Hiroshi Katsumi.” One cannot help but wonder what details about his own life he saw fit to alter

REALITY BLURRED: HOW TO WRITE ABOUT REAL PEOPLE WITHOUT LOSING FRIENDS

Adrian Tomine: One reason why I haven’t done autobiographical work like A Drifting Life is because of my essentially cowardly nature in which I’m afraid to face other people who I might portray in such a story. There are so many real-life figures that you show in this work, have you had any response or reaction from these people you drew in the book?

Yoshihiro Tatsumi: Hm. The only people who come out in this book are my parents, my sister, brother, my friends, the manga artists I was working with, that was the focus of the gekiga movement. The publishing companies, the president of the publishing companies; all of those people were in the book. I’m sure there are people who think I’m not saying such nice things about them.

So that was part of the reason why I changed my name in the book to Katsumi, because I wanted to create a distance between me and this character in A Drifting Life. Hopefully, to not have all my relationships go totally south. (laughs) So the story is all true, but fortunately, because of this, I haven’t had any trouble at all with anyone.

In my next story, Adrian will be in it. So I don’t know if it will get me in any trouble with him or not! (laughs)

Adrian Tomine: The last time we talked, you mentioned that you were doing something interesting about the tradition of Japanese literature that you were working in...?

Yoshihiro Tatsumi: In Japan, there is a tradition of the "I" novel, the autobiographical novel, where everything is true, but you change the name of the main character. Everyone knows that it’s you, but the name is changed so it gives you that distance. It’s a particular kind of genre of novel in Japan.

There doesn’t seem to be this kind of tradition in America. I talked with D&Q about it, and there was some issue with the name, but didn’t want to lose any friends over this, so I wanted to keep the name different.

At first, Drawn & Quarterly's lavish publication of gekiga pioneer Yoshihiro Tatsumi seemed unnecessarily indulgent. But by the time the third collected volume Good-Bye was released, it had become clear that the publisher is indeed doing an important cultural service to the world

We've had this now from Casey (Dororo), Carlo (Black Jack) and even Theron (Black Lagoon) - they've all counter-intuitively complained that a manga has production values that are too high. What is this? Nobody ever complains that DVD releases have too many extras or too nice a box. Is it OCD because not every book on their shelves is 7.5 x 5"? Is it inverted snobbery? Or maybe fanboy (/girl) status anxiety stemming from the delineations between manga and other comic markets getting blurred and thus robbing their cosy otaku club of some of its exclusivity?

Or is it just code for "this costs more than $9.99"? If so, I wish they'd just say so.

This is a pretty good review of a fascinating and important book but - and I dare say this is ANN's fault rather than Casey's - why on Earth is it only being reviewed now, in July?

Moomintroll wrote:

This is a pretty good review of a fascinating and important book but - and I dare say this is ANN's fault rather than Casey's - why on Earth is it only being reviewed now, in July?

Backlog was the reason cited last time a review was tagged as months behind the release date. I wondered how Otaku USA managed to print some reviews ahead of ANN when you'd think a website would have the edge in timeliness over a bimonthly magazine.

Could be the availability of review copies.

Could be the availability of review copies.