Disappearance Diary

By Hideo Azuma. Published by Fanfare / Ponent Mon. 

Softcover, 200 pages, B&W, 2008 (originally published in Japanese in 2005)

In 1989 Hideo Azuma left his family and work and tried (unsuccessfully) to hang himself using the slope of a mountain. This autobiographical account of his slide into alcoholism and eventual recovery takes painful experiences from the darkest reaches of his mind and treats them with an overriding sense of a cartoonist's humor.