It’s been reported that Tsuge Yoshiharu passed on March 3rd of this year. He was 88. It goes without saying at this point that he is one of the greats in the international comics scene. His brutal honesty about his own internal demons served as the template for so many manga-ka who came after him and helped spawn manga criticism in Japan. For manga fans around the world Tsuge-san was thought of as something of a white whale, his reluctance to be translated meant that only a couple stories had snuck out to international readers. Luckily for comics fans everywhere, Tsuge-san’s son Shōsuke convinced him in the past decade to allow these translations and we began to see his work in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, and English.
For Drawn & Quarterly, publishing Tsuge-san had long been a dream. Our good fortune in publishing so many of the greats from the manga renaissance of the 60s and 70s like Tatsumi Yoshihiro, Mizuki Shigeru, Hayashi Seiichi, Katsumata Susumu, Tsurita Kuniko, and Tsuge Tadao meant we were very aware that we were missing a couple of crucial names—Shirato Sanpei and, of course, Tsuge Yoshiharu. Tsuge-san’s work is more varied than he’s often given credit for—famous for a kind of brutal surrealism, Tsuge-san has also produced work that is funny, wretched, weird, and sentimental. His comics are as revelatory today as when he made them 40-50 plus years ago. As Chris Ware put it,“Yoshiharu Tsuge’s influential stories are mature, experimental and challenging… the world rush[es] in with all its complexity, humanity, beauty, uncertainty and violence.”
Research into Tsuge-san’s life revealed that his wife Fujiwara Maki had published a memoir of one year in their lives together, My Picture Diary. We were fortunate enough to be able to publish this beautiful and illuminating work for which Maki-san won an Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia in 2024.
With unfortunate timing, Tsuge-san’s latest collection, He Rolled Me Up Like a Grilled Squid will be hitting stores next week. It’s a great jumping on point. It contains some of his most emotionally honest and harrowing stories ever.
It’s truly been a great honour to publish Tsuge-san’s comics and we extend our deepest condolences to his son, Shōsuke.
