Yoshihiro Tatsumi

The work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi is frank and often harsh in its depiction of reality. Even lighter stories often contain undercurrents of despair, as if the lightness will end or is but brief consolation for a deeper foreboding. While early in his career Tatsumi embarked upon the kind of episodic genre fare pioneered by cartoonists such as Osamu Tezuka, his later work turned toward darker concerns in self-contained stories, which he called gekiga. Many artists, designers, and writers who identify as Japanese—from Kenzaburo Oe to Rei Kawakubo—in some respects are inclined to resist the “post-Hiroshima” label, not as