A Drifting Life

Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s A Drifting Life, published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2009, is a monumental autobiographical manga that chronicles the artist’s own coming-of-age in post-war Japan. Spanning the 1950s and 1960s, the single-volume work—written and drawn by Tatsumi himself, with Taro Nettleton credited as a frequent writer—offers an intimate, unflinching look at the birth of gekiga, the alternative manga movement Tatsumi helped pioneer. It stands as a vital document of both a transformative era in Japanese comics and the personal struggles of a master storyteller.