When I asked an editor for a quick summary of the history of Japanese comics, he drew two mountains: on top of the first one, he wrote Osamu Tezuka, and on the other, Yoshiharu Tsuge. Sadao Yamane's book Osamu Tezuka and Yoshiharu Tsuge: The Starting Point of Modern Comics (1983) shares this editor's point of view. For the poet Shirôyasu Suzuki, Tezuka and Tsuge are both accomplished creators -- Tezuka for his acquaintance with the lengthy development of setting and character and the relationships that bind disparate elements into a thematic whole; Tsuge because he surrendered himself completely to self expression, going deeply into what lies beyond visual norms.

Tsuge's fame is due mainly to his comics, but he has also drawn numerous illustrations and has written about his trips, dreams and daily life in the form of a diary, as well as essays, many of which were illustrated and would later inspire comics adaptations. Despite not being very prolific, with no new work made since 1987, his comics are still in demand and reprinted today. Several movies have been made based on his stories: Akai Hana (Red Flowers) in 1976 by Shôichirô Sasaki, Munô no Hito (The Useless Man) in 1991, by Naoto Takenaka (who both directed and starred), Gensenkan Shujin (The Master of the Gensen Inn) in 1992 and Nejishiki (Screw Style) in 1998 both by Teruo Ishii, and Jôhatsu Tabi Nikki (Vanished Travels Diary) in 2002 by Isao Yamada. In 1998, nine adaptations of Tsuge's stories appeared on television, titled Tsuge Yoshiharu Wârudo (The World of Yoshiharu Tsuge).

The Start

Tsuge's first published comic was a one-page detective mystery titled "Hannin wa dare da!" ("Who is the Criminal?"), that ran in the October 1954 issue of Tsûkai. At that time, Tsuge drew for the Japanese library market where readers could borrow a book or a comic for a small fee. He sharpened his story-telling skills by not only creating other mysteries, but also ninja stories, science fiction, and romance. (Illustration) But when this market collapsed, he found himself unemployed and depressed. By the mid 1960s, the avant-garde comics magazine Garo launched and soon became a leader of artistic expression in comics. Editor Katsuichi Nagai was looking for new artists and he published an ad asking Tsuge to contact him.

In February 1966, Tsuge released "Numa" ("Swamp") in Garo, a story that shattered the usual conventions by lacking a conclusion and subtly mingling eroticism with death. (Illustration) Although there was little reaction from readers and fans, some critics supported this new form of storytelling. A group of critics came together to form the critical magazine Manga Shugi (Comics-ism -- The ending "shugi" is used to compose words like anarchism, classicism, and so on) published from March 1967 to April 1974, with a lot of attention paid to Tsuge's work. Thanks to Manga Shugi, Tsuge met Junzô Ishiko and Susumu Gondô (who would later publish two books of interviews with him in 1993). Ishiko wrote a long article for Garo in February 1968 titled "Sonzairon Anchi Manga" ("Anti-Comics Dealing with Ontology") that added to the understanding of Tsuge's comics. In June of 1968, a special issue of Garo dedicated to Tsuge's work featured articles by such people as the well-known film historian Tadao Satô, as well as filmmaker and "Situationist Theater" director Jurô Kara. Contributing to Tsuge's growing popularity, this critical show of support helped to free Tsuge from the mundane genre restrictions of manga.

I-Comics

"Chîko" ("chirpy"), published in the March 1966 issue of Garo, is the story of a poor unemployed comic artist living with his girlfriend who works in a bar at night to support them. (Illustration) They buy a pet bird, which brightens their daily life, but the man kills it in an unconscious, malevolent act. He claims that the bird escaped and his girlfriend searches for it in vain. The way Tsuge tells the story hints at the implicit conflict: While the man spends most of his time inside the apartment, the woman goes in and out freely, leaving the man and the bird imprisoned and depending on her for care. While carefully molded images and the timing of the dialogue hold the reader's attention, the considered compositional nuances of the story suggest an underlying subtext.

Yet, "Chirpy" is based on his own memories. It shares similar characteristics with a literary genre called I-novels, which was regarded as a very prestigious literary genre (as opposed to mere entertainment). So when the comic critic Susumu Gondô asked Tsuge if he had a problem investing a form primarily perceived as simple entertainment with literary values, he answered: "I had not thought about it. That is why I could draw naturally. Actually, I thought it could be interesting to do so using real facts." Not everything in this story comes from Tsuge's life experiences, but for critics and historians, here was an I-comic, and with time Tsuge would become the main figure of this new genre.

The researcher Tomo Suzuki writes in his book Narrating the Self (1996) that the I-novels genre is a "narrative in which the author is thought to recount faithfully the details of his or her personal life in a thin guise of fiction." The purpose of this kind of narrative is clearly delineated by the writer Chôkitsu Kurumatani who writes in an essay that, "I-novels question the root of one-self's existence... this ominous and mysteriously unknown part that hides inside the ground of daily life." Tsuge said, "It is almost impossible to represent difficult problems with drawings only; so the story is very important." Reality and fiction mingle in order to reveal the interior self, therefore going beyond the simple ego of a man and thus reaching a more universal human truth.

His Childhood

Tsuge was born on the 30th of October 1937 in Katsushika, a neighborhood of Tokyo. During his first year he stayed at Oshima Island in the Izu prefecture, returning later at the age of four. His oldest memories are of Katsushika: "Three members of a family look at a gray color sea. The sun is going down. In the distance, there is the peak of the headland in front of these three figures. It is my younger brother, my father and myself around four years old. I do not think this landscape is real and I do not know where I got this memory but it is my oldest one and it sticks in my mind" (Danpenteki Kaisôki "Fragmentary Memories' Record," 2 April 1969). This image also makes the cover of "Umi e" ("Toward the Sea") in Comic Baku, March 1987. It is one of the last comics that Tsuge created, in a period where he attempted to go back to his childhood.

Yoshiharu and his two brothers Masanori and Tadao (also a renowned comic artist) were born during World War II. After the death of their father, in 1942, their mother remarried and gave birth to two girls. "Toward the Sea" takes place around 1951. The family, which is very poor, has moved illegally into an abandoned house where the father-in-law has opened a sewing shop. He is a violent man and the atmosphere is unbearable for Yoshiharu who wished to go with his older brother, who worked in the electroplate factory ("Oba's Electroplate Factory" Raw Vol.2 #2, 1990). Yoshiharu felt trapped in this sewing shop, spending all his time at home and feeling as though he had no free space. As he remembers an agreement with a school friend to sail the world, he decides to stow away, but before the ship leaves he is caught, handed over to the police and spends a night in a jail. All these events come from his past. Tsuge himself recognized that and stuck close to what happened. "Tadao's Shôwa Goeika" ("Psalm of the Shôwa Era," Garo) deals with the past of Tadao, Yoshiharu's younger brother, and recounts the family from a similar period. Of course, Tsuge's comic is more than a recollection of memories. The sea represents a space without borders far from human society and embodies the wish to escape from his painful world. Yoshiharu's dialogue emphasizes this idea: "I had no refuge," "I had nowhere to go and I felt lost." (Illustration) This comic is not just a way to exorcise a dark past, it describes an existential pain that asks, "Where?" which the image of the sea tragically embodies: No place to escape, no refuge, only a dead-end that ends before the sea. In his stories of trips or of dreams, this interrogative question of "where" motivates and haunts the displaced characters as well as Tsuge's alter ego.

Travel Stories

Since Tsuge could not escape Katsushika as a child, he traveled a lot as a young man, especially in the central and northern areas of Japan, in the general areas of Aomori, Chiba, Fukushima, as well as the peninsula of Izu. He crossed impoverished places like mountain and fishing villages, preferring a desolate thermal spring to the kinds of places recommended by a tourist guide. Most of all, he appreciated the simplicity of constructions, a kind of destitute simplicity that would look miserable if it had not been for the compassion he felt for the land and the people living there. (Illustration)

Tsuge kept pictures of his trips around Japan and from them drew illustrations that accompany his essays, such as Sassô Tabi Nikki (Invigorate Travel Diary, 1977), Jôhatsu Tabi Nikki (Vanished Travel Diary, 1981), Tsuge Yoshiharu Nagaregumo Tabi (Yoshiharu Tsuge's Travels on the Clouds Stream, 1982), Tsuge Yoshiharu Tabi Niki (Travel Diary of Yoshiharu Tsuge, 1983), and Hinkon Ryokô-ki (Impoverished Travel Diary, 1991). These trips become new sources for works identified by the critics as "Travel Stories." They consist of unexpected encounters with local people that drive the plot of each story. Mingling documentary, the real places and fictional characters, Tsuge succeeds in giving the characters a vivid humanity, the setting a sense of actuality and the theme a universal relevance. In the comic Honyaradô no Ben-San (M. Ben of the Igloos) published in June 1968, a traveling comics writer stays at the so-called "Inn of M. Ben," a poor house almost buried by the snow, where he is soon holed up with M. Ben, a grumpy old man clumsily hiding a genuine sympathy for his unexpected visitor. (Illustration) The charm of this work comes from at least two ways of drawing: First, the reader sees everything through the eyes of the author's character, thus conveying a vivid feeling of his life (like the deep pleasure he takes in listening at the waterway) or looking naturally at Ben with the same feeling of compassion; secondly, as much of the story occurs outside, we can see the flakes of snow pushed by the wind whipping the bodies, blurring the figures and dissolving the contours of the land. Its whiteness erases all kind of details, creating a feeling of an infinite empty space, which reveals the derisory smallness of human beings. In response to Gondô's question, "What does traveling mean to you?" Tsuge answered, "It is not only to get free from daily life, it is also in the relationship with nature to become oneself a point in the landscape."

The peace Tsuge found from his trips tended to evaporate as the question "What is the meaning of life?" increasingly tormented him. In September 1968, he decided to vanish in to the Kyûshû area, which he documented in Vanished Travel Diary and used as a basis for Yanagi-ya Shujin (The Master of the Yanagi Inn), published in two parts in February and March 1970. (Illustration)

Tsuge thought that by moving far away, getting married and starting a shared life, that he would cut his roots and be free from all his troubles. The story deals with a man who could have become the master of the Yanagi Inn by marrying the owner, but this does not happen. Overlapping with Tsuge's own life, this comic tells us that no matter how far a person may go, one can never escape oneself. Also in this comic, Tsuge "quoted" (graphically) an I-novel written by Motojiro Kajii, Aibu (The Caress) in 1930. For example, he uses Kajii's image of playing with a cat's paw as the character puts the paws on his eyes to feel the softness of them.

Dream Stories

All of Tsuge's "dreamed stories" are very different, either in style or in content, but they have recurring motifs, such as eyes and water. In June of 1968 Tsuge wrote Nejishiki (Screw Style, [reprinted in The Comics Journal #250]), based on a dream he had while taking a nap on the roof of his apartment building. This comic created a big shock among readers but also among artists. They either thought that it had nothing to do with comics, that it was a gag comic, or that this was proof of comics as art. With Lîsan Ikka (The Family of Mr. Lee, June 1967), Screw Style is one of his most parodied strips. Although there are several possible interpretations, it is interesting to look at how the characters move inside the story and through the drawing. While almost all the characters stay seated or lie down, always in a static position, only the main character walks. But where does he go? He comes from the sea at the beginning and goes back to the sea at the end. Some critics argue that it is an archetypal image of birth -- sea and blinding wound symbolizing water and blood respectively -- while the imagery of the Styx and its ferryman to the boat driven by someone hardly seen represents death. However, this may go too far. In Tsuge's world, it is easy to arrive at the conclusion that nobody goes anywhere no matter how a person moves because a path is just an ersatz of freedom. The main character was cured of his wound but his life experience lead him to the same place again, which has much to do with Tsuge's ontological question, "Where can one go to feel free?" And at this stage of his career, the answer was still "nowhere."

The success of Screw Style led Tsuge to use his dreams to create new stories called "Dream Stories," a kind of sub-genre of I-comics. The first one of this new series is Yume no Sanpo (Dreamed Walk, April 1972), which marks a new stage in his drawing style. The page organization ventilates and gives an impression of clarity that harmonizes well with the story itself: A man crosses a muddy path and finds a woman who has slipped down. Her position gives him erotic ideas that he satisfies and he continues on his way. (Illustration)

In 1976, Tsuge started to keep records of his dreams and created comics out of some of them; Soto no Fukurami (The Expanded Outside) is an example of this. (Illustration) It is a very strange comic without word balloons, with a kind of pictograph character, painted in pastel colors. It deals with the fear of the outside, something very abstract that he manages to draw by using a smooth white color -- "It was a kind of misty undulation, an extraordinary abstract feeling inside me that I would call the night, or the outside." This story focuses on the "outside" as terror, and a confinement of oneself that leads to death.

Life Stories

In 1969, Tsuge met Maki Fujiwara and fell in love. Six years later, following the birth of their son, they were married and Tsuge started a diary about his daily life. He wrote about more or less small events that comprised his day. When he did not draw, he was busy with the preparation of a TV series, Akai Hana (Red Flowers) based on some of his short stories, as well as the opening of a used camera shop and family trips. In 1982, he had to close his shop while his wife started a career as an author, publishing her Watashi no e Nikki (My Illustrated Diary), showing a very nice sense of drawing in a naive style. The following year, Kodansha released Tsuge Yoshiharu Nikki (The Diary of Yoshiharu Tsuge), which collected diary entries serialized in the literary magazine Shôsetsu Gendai (Nowsday Novels), covering the period of November 1975 through September 1983.

In 1984, Hiroshi Yaku created a new magazine, Comic Baku, for which he asked Tsuge to create new comics. Tsuge submitted work to every issue until the magazine's end in 1987 (15 issues total). Tsuge suffered from chronic depression and each of his crises caused him to deeply despise himself. The comics presented in Comic Baku show this depression: "Sanpo no Hibi" ("Days Walking," June 1984) or "Aru Mumei Sakka" ("An Unknown Author," September 1984) present the main character confronted with money problems or employed as an assistant of a famous author. Also, "Ishi wo Uru" ("Stones Salesman," June 1985 -- illustration), "Munô no Hito" ("A Useless Man," September 1985), which would become a series of the same name, "Torishi" ("Bird Seller," December 1985), "Tansekikô" ("In Search of Stones," March 1986), "Kamera wo Uru" ("Salesman of Cameras," June 1986) and "Jôhatsu" ("Vanished," December 1986) would all feature a main character who resembles Tsuge in appearance and age, with events reflecting the ones he had at that time. In addition, he depicts the situations in a raw way, as if the main character were constantly caught in the act of abandoning himself.

Many of the readers thought that it was a faithful depiction of Tsuge's life. Some even looked for him behind his shop of stones along the Tama River where, of course, he was not. As Tsuge said about this series: "In order to give it realism, I use materials around me like the neighborhood where I live, the landscape of the Tama river and so on as I want to introduce facts in the story, but not more than this because when you process a story larger in scale, the reader perceives the lies..." (Tsuge Yoshiharu Manga-Jutsu [The Manga Art of Yoshiharu Tsuge] 1993, p.339). The story is about a man who is poor and lives in the margin of society. He tries to make more money but he does not want to deal with competition, so he decides to sell stones, goods that show accurately his denial of a market production system and his wish to keep relaxed like a stone on the border of the river.

The film historian Tadao Satô (Nihon Eiga Shi Daisan [History of Japanese Movies] 1995, p.307) sees in this series an antiphrasis of the welfare society because the characters are all poor and powerless but they keep a sense of honor. He also sees a respect for the family in spite of a grumpy wife and a weak child. Actually, for Tsuge, family represents the people whom he will never dismiss, trying to do his best as the very essence of life is in sharing time and love with them. In response to the question "What is happiness for you?" he answered: "My wife has gone but if you would have asked me this before, I would have answered: The safety of my wife. I prayed so much for it..." (Interview, 25 April 2003). His life today is still a reflection of his comics. He stays at home, avoiding social contact, and wanting no more money, power or material gain, going against society's obsession with always obtaining "more."

Conclusion

In Tsuge's work, his main character is motivated by a contradictory desire for separation and reconciliation. His character looks for new landscapes and ephemeral encounters; he keeps isolated from others by spending time sleeping or staying in confined places. In a more extreme way, the character rejects his "self" and tries to disappear. None of this alleviates his malaise apart from a temporary lightness of being. He seeks relief by identifying himself with nature, as a point in a landscape, but also through relationships with women and especially through his close relationship with his wife and son.

Tsuge was able to create a new type of story thanks to the editorial policy of Garo. Because of his works, comics in Japan are definitively an art form for adults rather than entertainment exclusively for children. His influence is huge and widespread, including the trend, beginning in the 1970s, of comics revealing the psychological nuances of their characters and the freedom for cartoonists to express what they want to say instead of following established story genres. All of this is a result of Yoshinaru Tsuge's pioneering work. In the history of Japanese comics, Tsuge has his place on top of the mountain.

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