Oba Electroplating Factory - Yoshiharu Tsuge

Oba Electroplating Factory by Yoshiharu Tsuge, translated by Ryan Holmberg / ISBN 9781770466791 / 272-page hardback (including a long essay by Holmberg), 6.45 x 8.65 inches, published in 2024 by Drawn & Quarterly

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An alt-manga legend strikes out on his own, creating some of his most revealing and personal works

Oba Electroplating Factory is a startlingly bleak but nonetheless captivating portrait of mid-century Japan in its most unglamorous iteration. Glimpses of the artist reflecting upon his life, his work, and his contemporaries pepper the narrative landscape: a wife teases her husband about a former fling on a trip to the hot springs, a young cartoonist is aghast at the cavalier conduct of his supposed betters, and imperfect men must grapple with the discomfort of their own honesty. Tsuge’s stories are studies in staging nature, working to evoke stillness and movement in such a way that renders his chosen setting a character all on its own.

Following the breakthrough success of Nejishiki, Yoshiharu Tsuge forges a path for autofiction in manga and changes the cultural landscape of comics forever. Some of his most revealing and personal works were published between 1973 to 1974. As much as it is a testament to the author’s predilection for addressing sensitive and mature themes in response to his culture, this volume also collects works from the only period in which Tsuge tries his hand at writing for a mainstream audience in earnest.

This fourth volume in the complete works of a legendary manga-ka is an indispensable addition to the literary comics canon and shining example of world literature at its most human.

Yoshiharu Tsuge was born in Tokyo in 1937. Influenced by the realistic and gritty rental manga of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, he began making his own comics. He was also recruited to assist Shigeru Mizuki during his explosion of popularity in the 1960s. In 1968, working for Garo magazine, Tsuge published the ground-breaking story “Nejishiki”, 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 the Angouleme Comics Festival and in 2017 he won the Japan Cartoonists Association Grand Award.