A Drifting Life

By Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Published by Drawn & Quarterly. 

Softcover, 840 pages, B&W, 1995-2006 (2025 printing)

The award-winning memoir translated by Taro Nettleton with a new design by Adrian Tomine

In this memoir that won two Eisner Awards, the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, a prize at the Festival de la BD d’Angoulême, and was adapted into a feature film that debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, legendary manga-ka Yoshihiro Tatsumi uses his life–long obsession with comics as a framework to tell his life story incisively and unflinchingly. He deftly weaves a complex story that encompasses Japanese culture and history, family dynamics, first love, the intricacies of the manga industry, and most importantly, what it means to be an artist. Alternately humorous, enlightening, and haunting, A Drifting Lifeis the masterful summation of a fascinating life and a historic career.

Over sixty years ago, Yoshihiro Tatsumi expanded the horizons of comics storytelling by using the visual language of manga to tell gritty, dark, literary stories about the private lives of everyday people, a genre he coined “gekiga” in order to differentiate his comics from mainstream manga. His comics appeared in the legendary Japanese comics magazine GARO, and he became the first of his GARO peers to have his work published in English in the graphic novel era.

A Drifting Life is Tatsumi’s most ambitious, personal, and heart-felt work and considered to be one of the defining autobiographical works of the comics medium.

“Tatsumi had that magic touch all great storytellers have, illuminating many corners with economical light, telling simple tales that unfolded to reveal many subtexts, implications and messages. He used and abused the manga tradition, repurposing the format to interrogate a national culture, with real human characters who were bored, horny, frustrated, and lonely.” —The Guardian

“[A Drifting Life] manages to be, all at once, an insider’s history of manga, a mordant cultural tour of post–Hiroshima Japan and a scrappy portrait of a struggling artist...It’s among this genre’s signal achievements...It’s as if someone had taken a Haruki Murakami novel and drawn, beautifully and comprehensively, in its margins.” —The New York Times