Boat Life Vol. 2

Boat Life returns in Volume 2, with novelist Tsuda Kenta continuing to meander between home life, the family jeans shop, and days of solitude on the river. Among this graphic novel’s colorful cast of friends, we meet a former manga artist who dives for curiously-shaped stones and sells them from a riverside hut, and an eager producer intent on a film adaptation of one of Tsuda’s novels. Unfortunately, Tsuda’s health is deteriorating. He learns from the doctor that his liver was damaged by working at a blood bank when he was young. But Kenta continues his dream boat life, while obsessed by an enormous fish. Don’t miss the raucous night of Tsuda and his buddies boozing at a local temple. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more honest account in comics of how Japanese felt about life during and after World War II.

While fans of Trash Market and Slum Wolf will enjoy this late-career elaboration of après-guerre themes Tsuge has been exploring since his debut in the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo in the late 1960s, fans of his brother Tsuge Yoshiharu’s The Man Without Talent will appreciate the more relaxed and optimistic take on middle-aged reclusion and the grind of work and family.