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Drawn & Quarterly to Publish Yoshiharu Tsuge's Red Flowers, Shigeru Mizuki's Tono Monogatari Manga
posted on by Alex Mateo
Drawn & Quarterly announced on Thursday that it will publish Yoshiharu Tsuge's Red Flowers and Shigeru Mizuki's Tono Monogatari manga.
Drawn & Quarterly will publish Tsuge's Red Flowers manga in Jaunary 2021. The company describes the story:
The title story, “Red Flowers,” highlights the nuance and empathy that made Tsuge's work stand out from that of his peers. A nameless traveler comes across a young girl running an inn. While showing the traveler where the best fishing hole is, a bratty schoolmate reveals the girl must run the business because her alcoholic father is incapable. At the story's end, the traveler witnesses an unusual act of kindness from the boy as the girl suffers her first menstrual cramps—and a simple travelogue takes on unexpected depth.
The publisher will release Tsuge's complete works in a seven-volume set. The first volume, The Swamp, shipped in April. Ryan Holmberg is translating the works.
Tsuge was a pioneer of gekiga ("dramatic pictures") comics, a genre named by Yoshihiro Tatsumi in 1957 to describe an alternative style of manga that stresses realism and is aimed at adults. He is perhaps best known for his 1968 manga Neji-Shiki ("Screw-Style"), a surreal story about a man wandering a desolate, post-war Japan.
Drawn & Quarterly will publish Mizuki's manga adaptation of Kunio Yanigata's Tono Monogatari collection of recorded folk legends in March 2021. Mizuki debuted the manga in Japan in January 2010. Drawn & Quarterly describes the manga:
Originally written in 1910 by folklorists and field researchers Kunio Yanagita and Kizen Sasaki, Tono Monogatari celebrates and archives legends from the Tono region. These stories were recorded as Japan's rapid modernization led to the disappearance of traditional culture. This adaptation mingles the original text with autobiography: Mizuki attempts to retrace Yanagita and Sasaki's path, but finds his old body is not quite up to the challenge of following in their footsteps. As Mizuki wanders through Tono he retells some of the most famous legends, manifesting a host of monsters, dragons, and foxes. In the finale, Mizuki meets Yanagita himself and the two sit down to discuss their works.
North American publisher Drawn & Quarterly has released many of Mizuki's works in English, such as NonNonBâ, Hitler, Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, and Showa: A History of Showa Japan (Comic Showa-Shi), the latter two of which were nominated for a Harvey Award in 2012 and 2014, respectively. Mizuki's Showa 1939-1944: A History of Japan and Showa 1944-1953: A History of Japan manga won the 2015 Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material—Asia.
Mizuki is famous for his manga about yōkai — Japanese supernatural creatures. His manga and research into yōkai is largely responsible for the popularity that yōkai stories have today. Mizuki's supernatural manga Kitaro (GeGeGe no Kitarō) began in 1959 under the name Hakaba Kitarō. The stories center on an inhuman boy who straddles the line between the human and supernatural worlds.
