A gritty collection of graphic short stories by a Japanese manga master depicting life on the streets among punks, gangsters, and vagrants. Tadao Tsuge is one of the pioneers of alternative manga, and one of the world’s great artists of the down-and-out. Slum Wolf is a new selection of his stories from the late Sixties and Seventies, never before available in English: a vision of Japan as a world of bleary bars and rundown flophouses, vicious street fights and strange late-night visions. In assured, elegantly gritty art, Tsuge depicts a legendary, aging brawler, a slowly unraveling businessman, a group of damaged veterans uniting to form a shantytown, and an array of punks, pimps, and drunks, all struggling for freedom, meaning, or just survival. With an extensive introduction by translator and comics historian Ryan Holmberg, this collection brings together some of Tsuge’s most powerful work—raucous, lyrical, and unforgettable.

Slum Wolf

Comics & Graphic Novels

Tsuge, Tadao

Manga

New York Review Comics

Dark and funny comics from a Garo magazine manga-ka Tadao Tsuge was one of the key contributors to the legendary avant-garde Japanese comics magazine Garo during its heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, renowned for his unpretentious journalistic storytelling and clear, eloquent cartooning. Trash Market brings together six of Tsuge's compelling, character-driven stories about life in post–World War II Japan. "Trash Market" and "Gently Goes the Night" touch on key topics for Tsuge: the charming lowlifes of the Tokyo slums and the veterans who found themselves unable to forget the war. "Song of Showa" is an autobiographical piece about growing up in a Tokyo slum during the occupation with an abusive grandfather and an ailing father, and finding brightness in the joyful people of the neighborhood. Trash Market blurs the lines between fiction and reportage; it's a moving testament to the grittiness of life in Tokyo during the postwar years. Trash Market features an essay from the collection's editor and translator, Ryan Holmberg, who is a specialist in Japanese art history. He explores Tsuge's early career as a cartoonist and the formative years the artist spent working in Tokyo's notorious for-profit blood banks.

Trash Market

Drawn and Quarterly

Serialized between 1996 and 2000, Boat Life stars novelist Tsuda Kenta, a lightly veiled stand-in for the artist, Tsuge Tadao, himself, as he pursues a life of reprieve and reverie on a small, makeshift house boat on a river outside of Tokyo. Based loosely on the artist’s own daily life, this charming story follows the hapless protagonist on a series of magical absurdist quests, featuring a panoply of personable characters, including a drunkard fisherman, a pervy monk, a talking corpse, a senile hermit, and a half-supportive, half-doubtful wife and adult son. Most of the scenes take place on the Tonegawa River in Chiba, a favorite fishing spot of Tsuge’s. Others occur at the artist’s home or at Joker, a jeans and apparel shop the Tsuges opened in 1977. While fans of Trash Market and Slum Wolf will enjoy this late-career elaboration of après-guerre themes Tsuge has been exploring since his debut in the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo in the late ‘60s, fans of his brother Tsuge Yoshiharu’s The Man Without Talent will appreciate the more relaxed and optimistic take on middle-aged reclusion and the grind of work and family.

Boat Life Vol. 1 (Boat Life, 1)

Floating World Comics

Oblomov Edizioni

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Books by Tsuge, Tadao