YOSHIHIRO TATSUMI (1935–2015)

Bruce Weber reports in the New York Times that Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a Japanese cartoonist who helped establish a genre of adult comics and graphic novels in the manga tradition, died last Saturday in Tokyo at the age of seventy-nine.

Tatsumi is best known in the United States for A Drifting Life, published in Japan in 2008 and with an English translation in 2009. Drawing heavily on the details of Tatsumi’s own early life, it begins at the end of World War II when he was ten years old and covers the years from 1945 to 1960. A Drifting Life also won an Eisner award for best reality-based work in 2010.

Tatsumi was one of a group of young writers and illustrators who through their work in the late 1950s created a manga subgenre called gekiga, which dealt realistically with subjects like sex, violence, and mature emotional content in contrast to the dominant trends of manga at the time.

His other works include the collections Abandon the Old in Tokyo, Good-Bye, The Pushman and Other Stories, and, more recently, Fallen Words, published in 2009 after A Drifting Life_.