The Push Man and Other Stories

Sixteen short stories, most running eight pages, about men at the bottom of Japan's economic expansion: a man paid to push commuters onto trains, a sewer worker, a projectionist in a pornographic cinema, a man who collects discarded objects.

Each is a self-contained situation ending in resignation, violence or nothing.

Sixteen eight-page stories about men with jobs nobody thinks about, in the middle of an economic miracle.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Tatsumi coined the term — dramatic pictures — in 1957 to distinguish adult comics from the children's material the word manga then implied.

These stories are the form at its most characteristic: short, bleak, concerned with ordinary working people, and drawn in a plain style that refuses any decorative appeal.

They are set during Japan's high-growth period, and the prosperity is present in every story as something happening to other people.

The men here service the boom without participating in it, and the collection is a systematic account of who the expansion was built on.

Eight pages is extremely short for a narrative, and Tatsumi's economy is the technical achievement: a situation, a complication and a conclusion, with almost no dialogue.

Several stories turn entirely on a final image, and the endings are frequently abrupt to the point of seeming unfinished.

There is essentially no consolation. Characters are humiliated, trapped or destroyed, and the stories decline to provide meaning for any of it.

The relentlessness is deliberate and is also the collection's main limitation, since sixteen variations on futility produces diminishing returns. Tatsumi has said he was writing against the optimism of the period, and the uniformity is therefore deliberate rather than a failure of range.

A large proportion of the stories concern sexual frustration, transactional sex, or violence against women, and the depiction is frequently uncomfortable.

The stories are not endorsing what they show, and they are also not examining it with much curiosity. Readers should expect material that is grim without being interrogated.

Plain, slightly crude, with simplified figures and detailed backgrounds — the reverse of the usual emphasis, and deliberate.

The characters are anonymous by design and the environments are specific, which puts the weight on the circumstances rather than on the individuals inside them. Backgrounds are frequently traced from photographs, which was common practice and which contributes to the documentary quality the stories aim for.

Drawn and Quarterly published three collections edited and designed by Adrian Tomine, arranged by year, which is how Tatsumi reached English readers.

The presentation is excellent and the introductions are useful, and the project did a great deal to establish gekiga's reputation outside Japan. Tomine also designed them to read right-to-left at a time when most English manga was flipped, which was a deliberate statement about how the work should be treated.

Tatsumi is a central figure in the medium's development toward adult subject matter, and these stories demonstrate what that shift actually produced.

Their influence runs through alternative comics internationally, and the connection to American underground work of the same period is frequently noted. Tatsumi also worked in the rental library system that supported gekiga commercially, and the stories were produced for that market rather than for a mainstream magazine.

The collection is better sampled than read straight through, since the stories are tonally uniform and the effect flattens.

Three or four at a time preserves the impact that reading all sixteen consecutively dissipates. The collection is also arranged chronologically rather than thematically, so reading out of order costs nothing and may help sustain the effect across a longer period.

A Drifting Life is his six-hundred-page autobiography about the development of gekiga, and Abandon the Old in Tokyo collects stories from the following year.

The autobiography is the more historically valuable and the short stories are the better artistic achievement. Good-Bye, the third Drawn and Quarterly collection, covers 1971 to 1972 and is the darkest of the three, which is a meaningful claim given the competition.

Readers interested in the medium's history, in the short story as a form, or in post-war Japanese social conditions.

It is short and available, and it is not enjoyable in any ordinary sense. Readers should approach it as documentation of a particular moment and a particular class position.