Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Stunning.
“Prepare to be disturbed and blown away. The stuff is remarkable,
amazing.”—Los Angeles Times
Good-Bye is the third in a series of collected short stories from Drawn &
Quarterly by the legendary Japanese cartoonist Yoshihiro Tatsumi, whose
previous work has been selected for several annual “top 10” lists, including
those compiled by Amazon and Time.com. Drawn in 1971 and 1972, these
stories expand the prolific artist’s vocabulary for characters contextualized
by themes of depravity and disorientation in twentieth-century Japan.
Some of the tales focus on the devastation the country felt directly as a
result of World War II: a prostitute loses all hope when American GIs go
home to their wives; a man devotes twenty years of his life to preserving
the memory of those killed at Hiroshima, only to discover a horrible
misconception at the heart of his tribute. Yet, while American influence
does play a role in the disturbing and bizarre stories contained within this

volume, it is hardly the overriding theme. A philanthropic foot fetishist, a
rash-ridden retiree, and a lonely public onanist are but a few of the
characters etching out darkly nuanced lives in the midst of isolated despair
and fleeting pleasure.
Personal Review: Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Yoshihro Tatsumi, Good-Bye (Drawn and Quarterly, 2008)
With every collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi stories that Drawn and
Quarterly releases, I find myself becoming more and more enamored of
the man's work. I wasn't really sure that was possible; after all, D&Q's first
Tatsumi collection, The Push Man and Other Stories, made my beat-
reads-of-the-year list back a couple of years ago. But, yes, they just keep
getting better. Good-Bye, which collects pieces Tatsumi wrote in the early-
to mid-seventies, does something I'm not sure I thought was possible
where manga is concerned: it shows that it's possible for an artist to come
up with overtly political stories in the genre that actually still work as
stories. Difficult to do in any artistic medium, and thus all the more
impressive when they actually work. (Don't try this at home, kiddies;
Tatsumi is a professional's professional, and he makes it look easy, rather
like Bukowski does with poetry. He gets a lot of bad imitators, too.) If you're
familiar with Tatsumi, you've got some idea of what to expect; the
characters here are on the fringes and in the lower classes of society, for
the most part, and are being acted on by forces over which they have little,
if any, control; there are few positive resolutions in a book written by
Tatsumi. Depressing stuff, to be sure, but brilliant in the same way that
Mishima's stories are brilliant. The destination is not somewhere you want
to be, but the journey is exquisite. Drawn and Quarterly's next Tatsumi
project is a nine-hundred-page autobiographical comic; I, for one, can't
wait. **** ½
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