劇画漂流 · Gekiga Hyōryū
Yoshihiro Tatsumi's autobiography in comics: a young artist in postwar Osaka, the rental-book market, and the invention of gekiga. Filed under 3, the telling.
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3The letters of this title total 75, a 3 — the number of communication, creativity, and the public stage.
A Drifting Life is Yoshihiro Tatsumi's memoir, drawn over more than a decade, from 1995 to 2006, and collected in 2008 as a book of more than eight hundred pages. Tatsumi appears under a thin fictional name, Hiroshi Katsumi, but the events are his own.
The book runs from the end of the Second World War to 1960. It follows a teenager in Osaka who sends strips to magazine competitions, idolises Osamu Tezuka, and begins drawing for the rental-book publishers. Alongside it runs a history of the period: films, strikes, prices and the headlines of each year.
It is the most direct account there is of how gekiga was born. Tatsumi shows the practical reasons behind the movement, from the demands of rental-book publishers to the influence of film, and the moment in 1957 when he chose a new word for what he was drawing.
The book won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize in 2009. Its English edition, published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2009, won two Eisner Awards the following year and did much to introduce Tatsumi to readers outside Japan.
Set against the Pythagorean table, the title totals 75. Reduced, that is 3. The weight sits in “Drifting”, which carries 51 on its own and reduces to 6.
The 3 governs communication, creativity, and the public stage. The reference files it as an act of telling. It is a lens rather than a verdict, but it is a consistent one: the 3's instinct to turn everything into a story worth telling is the pressure under this entry.
Beneath the 3 sit two smaller figures: 33 in the vowels, 6 in the consonants. Service underneath, responsibility on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
総画 strokes is 47, an 11, volumes is 2, years serialised is 12, a 3 and debut year is 1995, a 6. That the 3 turns up in years serialised as well as in the letters is the sort of coincidence this reference collects rather than explains.
The Telling asks one thing of everything on it: watch the technique rather than the plot it is carrying. The 3 talks past the point. Where an entry here runs long, it is usually because the technique was more fun to describe than it was important. The other entries that reduce to 3 are collected on The Telling.