Tadao Tsuge

Tadao Tsuge (; real name ; born 1941) is a Japanese alternative manga artist. He is known to write stories about the kimin (; the "abandoned" people) and burakumin of Japanese society, as well the men who tried to reintegrate into Japanese society after World War II. Tsuge is one of the first artists to create autobiographical work about growing up in poverty in Tokyo.

Early life Tsuge grew up in the Keisei Tateishi neighborhood of Tokyo, Japan. As a child, he would often escape physical abuse at home by wandering the streets of the red-light district. In Granta, Tsuge wrote of his neighborhood, "...I would say that it was a red-light district and a plywood market and a town of hoodlums in one. I'll add one more thing: the whole place stunk of sewage." He continued, "In short, there was nothing special about Keisei Tateishi. It was a neighborhood like so many during the postwar recovery. What was it, then, about the place that left me with so many indelible impressions?"

In the 1950s, when he was a teenager, Tsuge began working for a blood bank business. While working there, he encountered people commonly considered "misfits," "lowlifes," or "damaged," who regularly sold their blood plasma. He continued to work at the blood bank into the 1960s. He also began writing the stories that would appear in Trash Market in the 1960s.

Work In 2015, the graphic novel, Trash Market, was published by Drawn & Quarterly, and was edited by Ryan Holmberg. The book, a collection of stories focusing on post-war Japan, follows the gekiga style of manga. The majority of work in the book was originally published between 1968 and 1972 in Garo, an alternative manga magazine. One main character, Kesei Sabu, was a trained kamikaze pilot, and he roams the streets of Tokyo, looking for fights with men and encounters with sex workers. Another character, Mr. Aogishi, is a relatively submissive business supervisor, who is traumatized by his experiences in World War II. Many of the characters in the book live in precarious housing situations, including temporary homes and rundown buildings.

Ryan Holmberg wrote that Kesei Sabu and Mr. Aogishi were "...the two paradigms of Japanese masculinity that Tadao kept returning to while drawing for manga magazines Garo and Yagyō in the '60s and '70s. As different as they are—one an essay in machismo, the other in impotence—they are two sides of the same coin." Gregory Smith wrote in PopMatters, "One notable feature of these works is the absence of post-war progress or vision of the future. Tsuge creates an eternal present devoid of any benefits of an improving economy or possibility of climbing out of a landscape of ruin and defeat."