Yoshiharu Tsuge: the first manga artist who used his personal life as story material

The Swamp is an anthology of Yoshiharu Tsuge's early manga and gekiga work, published by Drawn & Quarterly.

From the publisher:

Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of the most influential and acclaimed practitioners of literary comics in Japan.The Swamp collects work from his early years, showing a major talent coming in to his own. Bucking the tradition of mystery and adventure stories, Tsuges fiction focused on the lives of the citizens of Japan. These mesmerizing comics, like those of his contemporary Yoshihiro Tatsumi, reveal a gritty, at times desperate post-war Japan, while displaying Tsuges unique sense of humor and point of view.The Swamp is a landmark in English manga-publishing history and the first in a series of Tsuge books Drawn & Quarterly will be publishing.

The following essay was written by Mitsuhiro Asakawa and translated by Ryan Holmberg. It's an abridged version of the essay as it appears in the book. -- Mark

Gekigas new frontier: the uneasy rise of Yoshiharu Tsuge

by Mitsuhiro Asakawa

Yoshiharu Tsuges contributions to the development of gekiga and manga are immense. Tsuge was not only the first manga artist who used his personal life as story material, he was also the first to make his characters internal conflicts the center of his stories. Previously these techniques had been limited to literature and the I-novela type of autobiographical fiction popular in Japan since the early 20th century. Against the mad rush of Westernization of Japanese daily life after World War II, Tsuge also employed comics to revisit and find new value in native Japanese customs and modes of living, and without lapsing into nostalgia. Read the rest