The Push Man and Other Stories is a collection of gekiga short stories by manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi. It collects sixteen stories by Tatsumi which were serialized in the manga magazine Gekiga Young as well as in self-published dōjinshi magazines in 1969. Drawn & Quarterly collected the stories and published them on September 1, 2005. In 2006, the manga was nominated for the Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology or Collection and the Harvey Award for Best American Edition of Foreign Material.
Production
While writing the stories in the collection, Tatsumi was running a publishing house for manga rental shops so he did not have time to work on his own manga.[3] At the same time, manga rental shops were declining in favor of manga magazines.[1] According to Tatsumi in a 2004 interview, because he felt like an outcast in the manga industry, he wanted to sincerely portray the working class around him in slice of life portraits.[1] He was also influenced by police reports and human interest stories in newspapers.[1] When he was given an assignment, he would choose three stories from twenty of his ideas and show the layouts for his editor to choose one.[1] He would draw the actual stories without assistants using Kent paper and calligraphic pens.[1]
In a 2007 interview, Tasumi described Gekiga Young—the magazine his works were being serialized in—as an erotic "third-rate magazine" with low pay, which gave him freedom with the types of work he could create. Because the other stories in Gekiga Young were sexual with passive women, Tatsumi decided to take the opposite approach with his stories to interest readers. At the time he was also feeling "anxiety and fear of women" which influenced their depiction. He also did not feel that the aggressive men in the other stories reflected reality so his own male characters were able to be weak or passive. Because of his low page count and the resulting need for many panels, Tatsumi's editor suggested that he forgo speech bubbles to help focus on the art, which led to his silent protagonists. Tatsumi's editor had a good understanding of comics and got along well with Tatsumi, so when the magazine wanted to stop running his work, the editor quit as well because he only worked there due to Tatsumi's work.[4]
Release
The shorter stories in the collection were published in a bi-weekly manga magazine Gekiga Young (劇画ヤング, Gekiga Yangu) in 1969.[3] Tatsumi was only given eight pages to work with because he did not have a reputation in magazines for young men.[3] "My Hitler" and "Who Are You?" were afforded more pages because they were self-published in dōjinshi magazines.[3]
Drawn & Quarterly collected the stories, with Adrian Tomine as editor and designer, and published the manga on September 1, 2005.[2] Tomine, an American cartoonist, had first read Tatsumi's work in Good-bye and other stories—an unauthorized translation by Catalan Communications published in 1987[a]—at the age of 14.[6] Tomine had started losing interest in comics and tried to delve in alternative comics, finding that the manga, along with other works, reignited his passion for them.[6] Tomine had been attempting to get Tatsumi's work translated for a long time, a "surprisingly troubled and complicated process", and finalized the arrangements for The Push Man and Other Stories in a meeting with Tatsumi in 2003.[7] Because Tatsumi was so prolific, Drawn & Quarterly planned to publish a representative sample of Tatsumi's work from each year, starting at 1969 at his request.[8]
Themes
Tom Gill of the Hooded Utilitarian felt that the story "Sewer" was depicting an alienating society, especially with the non-expressive characters who repress themselves and their problems to "survive in the darker backwaters of modern industrial society".[9] The protagonist screaming at the disco indicated an "emotional breaking-point".[9] The two frames where it seems the characters would show concern for the aborted fetus are part of a "nihilistic theatre of cruelty".[9] Gill also says that "Sewer" was likely inspired by Yoshiharu Tsuge's earlier story "Sanshōuo" (山椒魚, "Salamander"), with both artists being serialized in Garo.[9] The combination of a fetus and the sewer would also appear in "My Hitler" and a six-volume epic titled Jigoku no Gundan (地獄の軍団, "Army Corps of Hell"), indicating "intense obsessions" by Tatsumi.[9] Other stories in the collection that focus on childbirth include "Black Smoke", "The Burden", and "Test Tube", which have in common Tatsumi's themes of sexual humiliation, economic inadequacy, and disgust related to reproduction.[9]
Reception
Carlo Santos of Anime News Network felt that the dead baby trope and pushover protagonists were overused by Tatsumi to elicit emotion. He also criticized Drawn & Quarterly's choice to flip the art. Santos concludes that "although the stories hammer the same point over and over again, and seemingly with the same character each time, their brutal honesty and stark settings will be a refreshing change for readers who wonder whatever happened to the diversity of the [manga] artform."[10] Tim O'Neil of PopMatters noted the dark and misanthropic themes in the stories, but said that Tatsumi distinguishes himself with the longer stories, especially "Who Are You", because of their "narrative lyricism" and "subjectivity".[11] Grant Goodman of Comics Village felt that Tatsumi's characters were portrayed through his art rather than dialogue, saying of his stories: "I cannot call any of them particularly excellent, but I do think that Tatsumi's style is refreshing and a welcome alternative to the style of current manga best-sellers."[12] Ng Suat Tong of the Hooded Utilitarian criticized the art, describing it as "crude, inexperienced and laid down with the kind of haste which begets mistakes" as well as the predictable misogyny in the stories and their linear structure, especially disliking "Telescope".[13] Daryl Surat of the Anime World Order podcast felt that the stories in the manga were a product of postwar Japan and difficult to identify with in a modern context, adding that the although the stories are similar, they are more concentrated due to their short length.[14] In a starred review, Publishers Weekly compared the tone of the stories as "between contemporary short fiction and EC Comics' old 'shock' comics", noting the theme of social maladjustment and complimenting Tatsumi's "evocative settings" and the flow of his stories.[2] Andrew D. Arnold of Time complimented the naturalism of the stories and art, but disliked the misogyny present in the men's relationships, concluding that the collection "feels as fresh and revelatory as when the works of Japanese cinema first began arriving in the U.S."[15] R.C. Baker of The Village Voice said that the manga's expressive art helped speak for its silent characters and that the subject matter distinguished itself from modern Japanese popular culture: "A fearless spelunker of the id, Tatsumi delves beneath the button-down uniformity of Japan's legions of office drones."[16] Tom Rosin of Manga Life was reminded of kitchen sink films by the stories and called Tatsumi a "master of the short story", saying that the manga "is so unlike the Japanese comics we're accustomed to now, and such a strong example of his early work I find it slightly terrifying that this book only contains selections of his best comics from 1969!"[17] David Cozy of the Asahi Herald Tribune felt that manga was distinguished from literature with the eight-page limit—which forced Tatsumi to distill his stories and was appropriate for representing his "characters' constricted lives"—as well as with the identifiable "everyman" in his art.[18]
The manga was nominated for the 2006 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology or Collection.[19] It was also nominated for the 2006 Harvey Award for Best American Edition of Foreign Material.[20] Time listed the manga, along with Tatsumi's Abandon the Old in Tokyo, as second place in its Top 10 Comics of 2006.[21]
