Word: tatsumi
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...discouraged by the lack of fare that appeals to anyone over 15, got some good news recently: Late last year, two different North American publishers released a pair of strikingly similar books from Japan and South Korea whose style will radically alter many Americans' view of Asian comix. Yoshihiro Tatsumi's The Push Man and Other Stories (Drawn & Quarterly; 202 pages; $20) and Seyong O's Buja's Diary (NBM; 280 pages; $20) belong in the library of anyone with an interest in the culture and arts of Asia, or just smart, fresh graphical renderings of the drama of ordinary...
...Tatsumi's The Push Man collects stories written in 1969, with an eye towards annual volumes that will collect more of this prolific artist's decades-long career. Totally absent of giant robots, schoolgirl romantic melodrama or any manner of supernatural beings, the stories of The Push Man are set exclusively in the gritty, working-class world of Japan's modern cities. Mostly kept to eight pages due to their original appearance in a Japanese comic anthology, they are endlessly inventive, compact tales full of cruel irony, quiet desperation and schadenfreude. Editor Adrian Tomine (author of Summer Blonde), correctly points...
...Tatsumi's characters include the sewer worker who encounters aborted fetuses, the pornographic film projectionist whose only turn-on is bathroom wall art and a metal puncher who sacrifices his hand for the insurance money. Some stories, like the titular one, are just enigmatic portraits of modern strife. In it, the Push Man, a student who earns extra money by cramming people into subway trains during rush hours, has the tables turned on him when he meets a sexually aggressive woman whose equally voracious girlfriends work him into a corner and tear his clothes off. The story ends...
...push man gets a taste of his own medicine in Tatsumi's "The Push...
...focusing on Japan's urban underclass, Tatsumi's stories feature many characters traditional to crime melodrama - pimps, prostitutes and hitmen - but without the glamour often associated with them. They toil and suffer in their labor as miserably as their counterparts in the "straight" world. The pimp, for example, begins to hate himself for sponging off of his prostitute girlfriend. So he runs off with another girl to the country to start a new life. On the way she says, "I'll work hard and take care of you," as he looks at her askance. Who among us hasn't made...