ayase
State Alchemist
I had never heard of Yoshihiro Tatsumi until I picked one of his books, The Push Man & Other Stories off the shelf today.
A quick read of the first story, and with endorsements from both of the Hernandez brothers (of Love & Rockets fame) on the back, I was sold. Only when I began to read the book proper did the subject matter become truly apparent.
In The Push Man... Yoshiro Tatsumi has written some of the most frank, sad, disturbing, seedy, horrifying stories imaginable with a thin streak of the deepest black humour I have ever encountered. And this is real horror. Who needs monsters in a world inhabited by Tatsumi's seemingly ordinary protagonists?
In the very first story, after being pestered for money by his prostitute girlfriend, a man holds his hand out under a steel press at work for the compensation. All of this happens in the space of four pages. Something about the frantic, but almost dialogue free pace at which the stories unfold makes me want to read faster, appaled but addicted at the same time.
If you can stand the subject matter - and some of it is, quite possibly, the stuff of nightmares - I doubt you will ever read anything else like it.
And that might be just as well.
A quick read of the first story, and with endorsements from both of the Hernandez brothers (of Love & Rockets fame) on the back, I was sold. Only when I began to read the book proper did the subject matter become truly apparent.
In The Push Man... Yoshiro Tatsumi has written some of the most frank, sad, disturbing, seedy, horrifying stories imaginable with a thin streak of the deepest black humour I have ever encountered. And this is real horror. Who needs monsters in a world inhabited by Tatsumi's seemingly ordinary protagonists?
In the very first story, after being pestered for money by his prostitute girlfriend, a man holds his hand out under a steel press at work for the compensation. All of this happens in the space of four pages. Something about the frantic, but almost dialogue free pace at which the stories unfold makes me want to read faster, appaled but addicted at the same time.
If you can stand the subject matter - and some of it is, quite possibly, the stuff of nightmares - I doubt you will ever read anything else like it.
And that might be just as well.
