Anchor Marco Werman speaks with Adrian Tomine about Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi's new autobiographical graphic novel, "A Drifting Life." Tomine edited the English language edition of the book.
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MARCO WERMAN: One thing that's still very much in favor in Japan is comics, or manga. Artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi has had a big influence on generations of manga artists -- and on cartoonists around the world. He's been drawing comics for more than fifty years. Tatsumi's new graphic novel, "A Drifting Life," just won the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize in Tokyo. It's a fictionalized account of Tatsumi's life in cartoon form. American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine edited the English edition of "A Drifting Life." Tomine, who's probably best known for his many New Yorker magazine covers, is a big fan of Yoshihiro Tatsumi. But he says that Tatsumi remains largely a cult figure.
ADRIAN TOMINE: I don't think he ever really had the, sort of, mainstream success that some of the other Japanese cartoonists enjoyed. And I think that for whatever reason he started to realize that his work was not going to be so widely embraced. And I think rather than try to alter his own style, I think he went deeper into it and has had a complete career that's very much focused on personal expression and not shying away from some of the darker truths of real life.
WERMAN: And Tatsumi essentially reinvented manga in the process, creating a style he called Gekiga. I know it's really hard to do in words and on radio but give us a sense of what the style looked like, kind of, pre-Tatsumi and post-Tatsumi. What did he, kind of, invent?
TOMINE: Well, I think if you were to ask someone in the Western world what they invasion manga, or Japanese cartooning to look like probably the first thing that would spring to mind would be the kind of work that dominated the market before Tatsumi came along, which is very, kind of, hyperactive with characters with very stylized giant eyeballs and plastic-y looking hair and generally focused on fantasy or adventure, you know, robots or whatever. And Tatsumi's work from the very start was pretty different from that. And I think he brought a new sense of realism and introspection. There's a lot of his stories that are about the thought processes of the characters or the emotional struggles that the characters are going through. And that had a real impact for certain artists.
WERMAN: "A Drifting Life" really isn't just an autobiography. It's a post war cultural history of Japan. And I'm wondering how much people living in that time there in Japan, how much their lives were infused with the headlines of the time, but also this need to escape, maybe, through comic books, the memories of war and the challenge of rebuilding their country.
TOMINE: Right, yeah, I think there was a segment of the population in Japan who, sort of, was put off by the work that Tatsumi was doing at the time that wanted to read a comic book about, you know, a giant robot that could do heroic deeds rather than having a mirror held up to what was around them. One of his most famous stories is called "Goodbye," is how it's translated. And it's a really brief piece but it focuses on a young Japanese woman who is living in poverty and forced to work as a prostitute and her main clientele seems to be these American soldiers who are living there and it's a pretty dark story. He's got a lot of stories, too, that just are about the aftershocks or the effects of the war on the culture, including the bombings.
WERMAN: I'd be curious to know if, since editing "A Drifting Life", you've stepped away from your own drafting table and looked at an illustration you've created and said, "Oh my gosh, that's a lot of Tatsumi in there."
TOMINE: I don't know about illustration but I think his work has definitely had an impact on my comics work, my cartooning. I think that's been going on for a long time and for someone who'd grown up reading super hero comics and children's comics from America to see a work that was not made on an assembly line, that everything was produced by one person and, kind of, everything expressed something from that person's heart, that was a big eye opener for me. And I think I've tried to take some of those lessons to heart.
WERMAN: Artist Adrian Tomine edited the English language version of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's "A Drifting Life." You can see an expert from "A Drifting Life" at theworld.org. Adrian Tomine, very nice to speak with you, thank you.
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