Boat Life Vol. 2

Fune ni Sumu #2

by Tadao Tsuge, Iyasu Nagata (Translator), Ryan Holmberg (Translator)

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.

Genres: Manga, Comics

304 pages, Paperback

Published July 14, 2026

About the author

Tadao Tsuge (born in 1941) has been drawing comics since the late 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he was one of the central contributors to the underground comics magazine Garo, and the magazines Yako and Gento. In addition to cartooning, Tsuge is an avid fisherman and has written essays on the subject. He has held full-time blue-collar jobs for most of his artistic career, most significantly on the cleaning staff at one of Tokyo’s for-profit blood banks, which figures prominently in a number of his works. In 1995, cult-film director Teru Ishii made a movie based on Tsuge’s comics. Tsuge lives in Saitama Prefecture, near Tokyo.

Reviews

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The two volumes of Boat Life show how different Tadao is from brother Yoshiharu. Yoshiharu was, despite protestations, at least something of an artiste, while Tadao is much more of a working man and artist in all respects, yet seemingly much more introspective…especially here, with the I-protagonist grappling with sentiments that those of us who both work (he helps run the family jeans shop) and see our artistic/freelance windows closing (here the character is a writer, older than me but coming to the end of his run in various ways…not sad, just philosophical). Although Tadao says this ends abruptly, that there was more planned — and I’m sure it would have been good for the wallet had those two installments come to fruition — the ending seems to be perfect, with “Tsuda Kenta” thinking about the exhaustion attendant to his life, the life of a cat he has befriended, a big crucian fish he is trying to catch, and so on. The minor details in here are good, especially how Tadao, like Yoshiharu, excels at rendering the female form in a few lines that merge the best of western and eastern comic-strip styles. Highly recommended and then some; together these two volumes are a masterwork and have callbacks to the careers of both Tsuges sprinkled throughout.