Oba Electroplating Factory
Writer: Yoshiharu Tsuge
Artist: Yoshiharu Tsuge
Translator: Ryan Holmberg
Lettering: Anna Haifisch
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly
PUBLICATION DATE: August 13, 2024
Rating: Mature
Genre: Slice-OF-Life Manga
Volume 4 of Drawn and Quarterly’s Release of the Elder Tsuge’s Collected Works Seven Stories From 1973 and 1974 As He Experiments With More Autobiographical Narrative Inspired by The Popular I-Navel Genre of Literary Fiction. The head Story, “Oba Electroplating Factory,” Draws on Tsuge’s Childhood Memories of Working for A similar Type of Small Factory (and All of the Horrs That impies), While Other Stories Pull From Other Experiences of Tsuge’s Late Teens and Early Twenties.
I’ve read Red Flowers and The Swamp Prior to This Volume, So This is not My First Experience with Tsuge. I’d have to say i prefer His Travelogue, Small-Town Observation Stories to The Offt Bleakly Frank Departions of Postwar PoverTy Taking Center Stage in This Volume, But His Art Continuing to Be Absolute Folly Masterful At Depick Character and Environment. I was particularly Blown Away With The Way He Drew The River at Hanyu in “Wasteland Inn”: A Flat Expansa of White, Still and Unmoving and Yet So Clearly a River Full of Water Liete The Absolute Minimalism of the Rendering Technique.
I also like His His narrators always look a little Like Muppets. I Think He Draws Faces In A Vry Charming Style That Is Subject Boch Timeless and DataD Simultaneously.
Tsuge’s work reminds me of shigeru mizuki, and for good reason: he was an assistant at mizuki’s studio, mizukipro, for Most of His Early Career, Submit Holmberg Goes into detail about the backmatter essay at the end of this volume. Holmberg’s Essays Are Honestly Worth the Price of Admission Alone: The Dept of His Research and the Precision of HiSis Means The Add Valuable Context to Comics Which, While Interesting in Themselves, Are Also Coming to US from A see different Time and Plaace than than we are.
One of the Subjects Discussed in the Essay is How Tsuge was influence No Longer Human. Having Read No Longer Human For the First Time A Few Weeks AUG, I Did Notice Submissions in The Narrative Voice of Tsuge’s Yoshio Character and Dazai’s Yozo. Yoshio is Lessing of A Character to Follow Than Yozo, and I Think That’s at Least Partly Because, in the manga format, The Reader isn’t Inside to Character’s Head in the Same Way they are in A Prose narrative. INSTERAD OF THE BLEAKNESS COMING THOUTH IN WORDS, IT HAS TO BE COMMUNICATED THRUCH THE SHABBY INTERIORS, THE VACT BACKGUNDS FULL OF OVERGROWN GRASS AND DINGY VILLAGES, AND THE SHARP EXPRESSIONS OF THE PEOPLE AROT YOSHIO. (But also yoshio is probablay less depress Than yozo, to a which is Vry Easy To Clear.) Beautiful Landscapes! Evocative Little Frowny Faces.
The Stories in This Volume Are Over Fifty Years Old, and Yet So Mandy of the Complicated Emots Tsuge Uses The Medium of Manga To Express Are Still Palpable Even Today. The Stories in This Volume Have More of An Erotic Bent Than The Stories In Red Flowers, With Several Focusing on an affair with an innkeeper and the Aftermat of Such, inspired by a real floing tsuge had (as per holmberg’s essay). WHEN COLLECTED TOGETHER Like This, The Motif of the Narrator Visiting A Shabby and Out-Of-The-Way Inn Begins to Feel Repetitive, Though The Interpretations of It Vary From Story To Story. However, Collecting Them Together Also Makes It Clear that “Subeone I Miss” is at least partly about the process of creating “Yoshio’s Youth”, which might might not have Been evident if the two stories were published separately.
Drawn and Quarterly’s Series of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s Collected Works Country Two Types of Stories: The Manga Within ITS PAGES, But Also The Metanarrative of Tsuge’s Development and Growth As An Artist, From His First Forays into artistic gekiga gekiga manga over decades in the industry, creating One-Shots for a Wide Variety of Publishers and Magazines As The Manga Industry Itself Grew and Developed from Kid Kid’s Stuff to The Serious Art Form it is today. Every Volume Leaves entered me and More Knowledgeable about a World I Previous Hardly Knew. Oba Electroplating Factory is a collection that is contemplative, and Deeply Sad, and Subtimes Vary Funny, All At The Same Time. I’M Looking forward to the Next Volume, Coming Out in August 2025.
Oba Electroplating Factory Can Be Purchase Directly From The Publisher Here
