He Rolled Me Up Like a Grilled Squid
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A manga icon's most perplexing, transgressive, and astounding work of horrorand surrealism
By the mid-1970s, Tsuge Yoshiharu was a man changed by circumstance--something hiswork from 1975 to 1981 boldly reveals. After settling into married life with fellow artistFujiwara Maki (author of Eisner-winning My Picture Diary), Tsuge would return to thenarrative formulas that he knew best: tall tales exchanged between fellow travelers,macabre parables tinged with magical realism, and the enduring comedy of the domesticeveryday in a Japan rebuilding itself in the decades following the Second World War.
And yet the confusion and mental illness simmering beneath the surface of his moresurreal works come to a rolling boil, reaching an unsettling and horrific crescendo in aseries of nightmarish delusions. He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid captures a midcareerauthor taking stock of his anxieties and suspicions while connecting the dotsbetween his seemingly monotonous present and his complicated past. Confrontationsbetween both periods in his life are explored through the lens of his deteriorating mentalstate, expressed directly through experiments with different visual styles collected in thisvolume.
Translated by prolific art and comics historian Ryan Holmberg, He Rolled Me Up Like AGrilled Squid is a veteranstoryteller's most compelling observations about people at their most human.
About this Author
Yoshiharu Tsuge was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1937. Influenced by the realistic and gritty manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, he began making his own comics and was briefly recruited to assist Shigeru Mizuki in the 1960s. In 1968, while working for Garo magazine, Tsuge published the groundbreaking story "Neji-shiki" (commonly called "Screw Style" by Western readers), which established him as an influential manga-ka and a cultural touchstone in the changing Japanese art world. He is considered the originator and greatest practitioner of the I-novel method of comics-making. In 2005, Tsuge was nominated for the Best Album Award at Angoulême International and in 2017 won the Japan Cartoonists Association Grand Award for Yume to tabi no sekai.
Reviews
"Tsuge throws open his inner gates of possibility and lets the world rush in with all its complexity, humanity, beauty, uncertainty and violence." --Chris Ware, The Washington Post
"A gritty and humorous postwar Japan is depicted in these early works by the influential manga cartoonist." --The Guardian
"Tsuge's raw and profound work is equal parts pathos and poetry, streaked with irony and ribaldry." --Kirkus, Starred Review
"Exemplary... an elucidating glimpse into modern manga's origins." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"[Tsuge] draw[s] horror from unflinching realism." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
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