What do you think?
Rate this book
Infierno: Hell
A personnel director, on the verge of retirement, an unemployed amputee who spends his afternoons on the terrace of a department store, a young sperm-donor with a sudden obsession, an aspiring writer supported by his live-in girlfriend. . .these are some of the protagonists of this anthology, through which Tatsumi demonstrates his mastery and brilliance in the short story genre.
146 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2003
2 people are currently reading
83 people want to read
About the author
Yoshihiro Tatsumi
49 books298 followersYoshihiro Tatsumi (辰巳 ヨシヒロ Tatsumi Yoshihiro, June 10, 1935 in Tennōji-ku, Osaka) was a Japanese manga artist who was widely credited with starting the gekiga style of alternative comics in Japan, having allegedly coined the term in 1957.
His work has been translated into many languages, and Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly have embarked on a project to publish an annual compendium of his works focusing each on the highlights of one year of his work (beginning with 1969), edited by American cartoonist Adrian Tomine. This is one event in a seemingly coincidental rise to worldwide popularity that Tomine relates to in his introduction to the first volume of the aforementioned series. Tatsumi received the Japan Cartoonists Association Award in 1972. In 2009, he was awarded the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for his autobiography, A Drifting Life. The same work garnered him multiple Eisner awards (Best Reality-Based Work and Best U.S. Edition of International Material–Asia) in 2010 and the regards sur le monde award in Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2012.
A full-length animated feature on the life and short stories of Yoshihiro Tatsumi was released in 2011. The film, Tatsumi, is directed by Eric Khoo.
Source: Wikipedia
His work has been translated into many languages, and Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly have embarked on a project to publish an annual compendium of his works focusing each on the highlights of one year of his work (beginning with 1969), edited by American cartoonist Adrian Tomine. This is one event in a seemingly coincidental rise to worldwide popularity that Tomine relates to in his introduction to the first volume of the aforementioned series. Tatsumi received the Japan Cartoonists Association Award in 1972. In 2009, he was awarded the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize for his autobiography, A Drifting Life. The same work garnered him multiple Eisner awards (Best Reality-Based Work and Best U.S. Edition of International Material–Asia) in 2010 and the regards sur le monde award in Angoulême International Comics Festival in 2012.
A full-length animated feature on the life and short stories of Yoshihiro Tatsumi was released in 2011. The film, Tatsumi, is directed by Eric Khoo.
Source: Wikipedia
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 23, 2021
This is a book for anyone who wants to broaden the usual range of manga/anime beyond giant robots, samurais, chibis, monsters, hentai, mecha, kawaii, "Versailles literature" or bikers with ESP powers.
This my first Yoshihiro Tatsumi gekiga manga. Since the late 40s, early 50s Yoshihiro Tatsumi and his circle pushed the limits of what manga could address aeasthetically and basically established the 'graphic novel' in Japan 40 or 50 yr before it became canonized in the West, or got its recognition at Angoulême.
The Gekiga was initially developed by him and the group around him as an anti-manga, going against the already dominant tradition of funnies or gag-manga (funny images) formats to try and offer a serious image of the modern world. It is not humourless nor plagued by what Nietzsche called the 'spirit of gravity', yet his deadpan humour does not aim to please. His manga pages are not just depicting drab realism - but an unpolished nonjudgemental realism of the big cities, a decidedly urban perspective, of living collectivities and stark isolation, of urban delights and neon, coexisting with bizarre and disturbing proximities and dependencies.
Drawing style is realistic in its lines, unpolished, and the plot is no longer than 8 pages max mostly. It is terse and incredibly effective as well as cinematically pleasing like all mangas (but also inspired directly by French Nouvelle Vague and noir cinema or even Mickey Spillane novels). It is realistic in a precise way because it looks where no mangaka before him dared look.
He covers the existential byways, the long falls, old people abandoned by their kids and befriended by strangers (The Thirsty City), the underworld homeless friendships of people with pet cockroaches (in The Hotel under the City), following various uncensored lives through their sexual (including zoophilia, including various fetishes that he does not exoticize or use for shock value) proclivities, without condemning, without normative strictures.
When he follows goodness where there is no room for goodness, care work where care is not available, Yoshihiro Tatsumi makes visible this lack and the invisible emotional turmoil it fosters. Tatsumi follows all miscalculations and uncalled destitutions, never imagined or told & drawn in any other manga before. This is a completely unembellished Japan.
Disability is treated as I have never seen before (Little Goldfish), maybe only in Japanese movies. He is considered on par with Will Eisner, but as Stefan Panor writes in his Preface (in the "The Land Where Nobody Smiles: Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the modern comics and gekiga"), he is able to draw attention and get away without to a recurrent main character similar to the ironic detective figure of Denny Colt aka Spirit. There is no Spirit in his manga, no permanent characters even if we might recognize here and there a self-portrait of a broad face nose, unkept, uncommunicative, with weary eyes, closed mouth and a certain air of resignation about him.
A character that can both free monkeys from Zoo in order to learn how to woo or sexually approach his chosen one, or one that is a fake employee, that wakes up, keeps dressing up like a normal employee just because he needs to cover up being laid off and living secretly just from horse races bets. He describes the hardships and lives of WWII army prostitutes in the Pacific and their vengeful STD jabs after the war near the US army barracks (War Diary of a Prostitute).
From the time of reconstruction to the start of the Japanese miracle and the boom economy, Yoshihiro Tatsumi should always be kept at our side as a guide.
The gekiga selected in this volume might come as shock for the average manga reader or fan, as our first knee-jerk reactions might be to actually expect gags, memes, LULZ, and entirely dismiss anything serious as pretentious. Well, yes, we need the gags in order to survive the day or get a thumbs up from our peers.
IMHO, gekiga accomplishes or continues what the proletarian novel did not have a chance to do as it became devalued culturally, financially and artistically. Tatsumi is illustrating our collective marching into cellular living, a perspective that fell out of fashion almost everywhere during the great rosy bubble economy but that keeps on inflating & bursting. Every one is singular but nobody is isolated, everybody responds to and is changed by encounters with others. There is a sense that all this anti-humorousness is necessary today not as an antidote, of sobering up, waking up, but to put things in proportion and get closer to the undeniable fact that vast majoritarian loosership is a key part of the success story of capitalism. I am very thankful to have found this volume at the local Berlin library and am very impressed that they have collected all these wonderful comics and manga's and made them available to everyone.
This my first Yoshihiro Tatsumi gekiga manga. Since the late 40s, early 50s Yoshihiro Tatsumi and his circle pushed the limits of what manga could address aeasthetically and basically established the 'graphic novel' in Japan 40 or 50 yr before it became canonized in the West, or got its recognition at Angoulême.
The Gekiga was initially developed by him and the group around him as an anti-manga, going against the already dominant tradition of funnies or gag-manga (funny images) formats to try and offer a serious image of the modern world. It is not humourless nor plagued by what Nietzsche called the 'spirit of gravity', yet his deadpan humour does not aim to please. His manga pages are not just depicting drab realism - but an unpolished nonjudgemental realism of the big cities, a decidedly urban perspective, of living collectivities and stark isolation, of urban delights and neon, coexisting with bizarre and disturbing proximities and dependencies.
Drawing style is realistic in its lines, unpolished, and the plot is no longer than 8 pages max mostly. It is terse and incredibly effective as well as cinematically pleasing like all mangas (but also inspired directly by French Nouvelle Vague and noir cinema or even Mickey Spillane novels). It is realistic in a precise way because it looks where no mangaka before him dared look.
He covers the existential byways, the long falls, old people abandoned by their kids and befriended by strangers (The Thirsty City), the underworld homeless friendships of people with pet cockroaches (in The Hotel under the City), following various uncensored lives through their sexual (including zoophilia, including various fetishes that he does not exoticize or use for shock value) proclivities, without condemning, without normative strictures.
When he follows goodness where there is no room for goodness, care work where care is not available, Yoshihiro Tatsumi makes visible this lack and the invisible emotional turmoil it fosters. Tatsumi follows all miscalculations and uncalled destitutions, never imagined or told & drawn in any other manga before. This is a completely unembellished Japan.
Disability is treated as I have never seen before (Little Goldfish), maybe only in Japanese movies. He is considered on par with Will Eisner, but as Stefan Panor writes in his Preface (in the "The Land Where Nobody Smiles: Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the modern comics and gekiga"), he is able to draw attention and get away without to a recurrent main character similar to the ironic detective figure of Denny Colt aka Spirit. There is no Spirit in his manga, no permanent characters even if we might recognize here and there a self-portrait of a broad face nose, unkept, uncommunicative, with weary eyes, closed mouth and a certain air of resignation about him.
A character that can both free monkeys from Zoo in order to learn how to woo or sexually approach his chosen one, or one that is a fake employee, that wakes up, keeps dressing up like a normal employee just because he needs to cover up being laid off and living secretly just from horse races bets. He describes the hardships and lives of WWII army prostitutes in the Pacific and their vengeful STD jabs after the war near the US army barracks (War Diary of a Prostitute).
From the time of reconstruction to the start of the Japanese miracle and the boom economy, Yoshihiro Tatsumi should always be kept at our side as a guide.
The gekiga selected in this volume might come as shock for the average manga reader or fan, as our first knee-jerk reactions might be to actually expect gags, memes, LULZ, and entirely dismiss anything serious as pretentious. Well, yes, we need the gags in order to survive the day or get a thumbs up from our peers.
IMHO, gekiga accomplishes or continues what the proletarian novel did not have a chance to do as it became devalued culturally, financially and artistically. Tatsumi is illustrating our collective marching into cellular living, a perspective that fell out of fashion almost everywhere during the great rosy bubble economy but that keeps on inflating & bursting. Every one is singular but nobody is isolated, everybody responds to and is changed by encounters with others. There is a sense that all this anti-humorousness is necessary today not as an antidote, of sobering up, waking up, but to put things in proportion and get closer to the undeniable fact that vast majoritarian loosership is a key part of the success story of capitalism. I am very thankful to have found this volume at the local Berlin library and am very impressed that they have collected all these wonderful comics and manga's and made them available to everyone.
Read
October 22, 2024Sorpresa máxima me he llevado con Yoshihiro Tatsumi y su antología "Infierno". Un manga más crudo, maduro, reflexivo y abiertamente sexual, con representación LGTB incluida, algo que no me esperaba dado el estilo del manga. Aborda temas universales, desde perdedores desesperados que encuentran un camino en la vida desde el deseo y liberación sexual, ojo, no en todos los relatos, porque el homónimo trata la bomba nuclear, aunque desde un relato totalmente ambiguo. Es súper interesante, lo que complementa un dibujo sencillo pero cargado de movimiento y expresividad -a resaltar que muchos de los protagonistas son mudos y el peso dramático cae en sus expresiones-.
Mis favoritos:
-Todo un hombre
-El telescopio
-¡Qué bonito es el progreso!
-Infierno
-La caseta
-La mujer de la nieve
Mis favoritos:
-Todo un hombre
-El telescopio
-¡Qué bonito es el progreso!
-Infierno
-La caseta
-La mujer de la nieve
July 28, 2020
Un recull d'històries curtes amb personatges solitaris, infeliços, insatisfets en unes circumstàncies vitals desgraciades que ens deixen tocats pel nivell de drama i de vegades tragèdia. Yoshihiro Tatsumi en estat pur.
January 31, 2024
Tatsumi è la voce bianca del Giappone che narra del nero oscuro del Giappone.
February 17, 2024
2'5 o 3 estrellas (?)
El relato que más me ha gustado ha sido el que da nombre a este manga: 'Infierno'.
El relato que más me ha gustado ha sido el que da nombre a este manga: 'Infierno'.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 12, 2011
I just love this guy. Not really manga, but rather "gekiga," the darker, more serious stuff. Characters with eyes that are proportionate! The story 地獄, about Hiroshima, commemoration, memory, is just deep as hell, and I'll teach it. This guy is not afraid to show distasteful sides of human nature, though he sometimes goes over the top. Anyway, a giant, and I'll take him over Tezuka Osamu any day!
July 21, 2015
I discover the manga, more precisely Gekiga. "L'ender" (The hell" is a collection of stories that brings us in the dark world of post-war Japan. 13 stories, 13 tormented characters and beautiful graphics.
March 12, 2016
2.5/3 estrellas (?)
El relato que más me ha gustado ha sido el que da nombre a este manga: 'Infierno'.
El relato que más me ha gustado ha sido el que da nombre a este manga: 'Infierno'.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews