It looks as though 2006 is shaping up as the year of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the pioneering manga-ka whose idiosyncratic and grimly naturalistic manga works had languished in semiobscurity for decades until the publication last fall of The Push Man and other Stories by Drawn & Quarterly. Not only will Tatsumi be honored as a special guest artist at this year’s San Diego Comic-con International, but Japanese horror novelist Koji Suzuki, whose bestselling J-horror novels The Ring and Dark Water have been turned into hit American movies, is writing the introduction to Abandon the Old in Tokyo, a new volume of Tatsumi stories that will be published by Drawn & Quarterly in September 2006.

In addition, his work is featured on the cover of the spring issue of Paris Review and included in the same issue, and his work will also be used on the cover of Penguin Classics’ new edition of Rashomon. Tatsumi also has new editions of his works coming out in Japan and Europe, and he is close to completing an autobiography that will be called A Drifting Life in Gekiga...