Storytelling
Everyone has a story. Your life, I believe, tells that story through the wake it creates: real estate developers leave buildings, scientists leave papers, writers leave books. Sad is the life that leaves no story.
I was happy to see, then, that the NY Times featured a piece about Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s new autobiography, A Drifting Life. (An 855-page monster!) I never quite understood why people, in general, can’t see the empty narcissism involved when non-writers attempt to write an autobiography. A painter can tell his story, for instance, with a body of work, perhaps even a self-portrait. But why attempt to write about your life if writing is not your strongest skill? It’s as if to say “I will settle for an inferior representation of myself” — the antithesis to a meaningful life’s work. I think Tatsumi understands that: his life’s work was manga; hence, he tells his best through his manga.
A book like “A Drifting Life” is fairly easy to pick apart on a drawing-by-drawing or line-by-line basis. Don’t make that mistake. Its pleasures are cumulative; the book has a rolling, rumbling grandeur. It’s as if someone had taken a Haruki Marakumi novel and drawn, beautifully and comprehensively, in its margins.