The New York Review of Books’ NYRC imprint has put together Slum Wolf, a collection of Tadao Tsuge’s stories new in English translation by Ryan Holmberg (who provides a long afterword to the volume).
Tadao Tsuge is one of the pioneers of alternative manga, and one of the world’s great artists of the down-and-out. Slum Wolf is a new selection of his stories from the late Sixties and Seventies, never before available in English: a vision of Japan as a world of bleary bars and rundown flophouses, vicious street fights and strange late-night visions. In assured, elegantly gritty art, Tsuge depicts a legendary, aging brawler, a slowly unraveling businessman, a group of damaged veterans uniting to form a shantytown, and an array of punks, pimps, and drunks, all struggling for freedom, meaning, or just survival.
I read “Bum Mutt” this afternoon and it was pretty weird and dark.
Biblioklept 