Abandon the Old in Tokyo Review: Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Bleak Portraits of Postwar Despair

After loving Tatsumi's memoir A Drifting Life, I went looking for the actual gekiga he helped invent — and Abandon the Old in Tokyo is the bracing, despairing real thing. These are short stories with no comfort in them: small, defeated men crushed by a postwar Tokyo that's getting rich without them. It's grim, and it's brilliant, and it's nothing like the manga most people picture.

This is the dark heart of what gekiga was for.

Quick Take

• A curated collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's 1970 gekiga (gritty, adult "dramatic pictures") short stories
• Bleak, unsentimental portraits of alienated working-class men in 1960s–70s Tokyo
• Rated M (Mature); a single volume collecting eight stories, published in English by Drawn & Quarterly (edited and designed by Adrian Tomine)

Who Is This Manga For?

• Readers interested in the literary, adult roots of gekiga and serious manga
• Fans of bleak, naturalistic short fiction (think Raymond Carver's despair in comics form)
• Anyone who read A Drifting Life and wants to see the work itself
• Readers who appreciate historical and socially critical comics

Content Warnings & Age Rating

Age Rating: M (Mature) Content Warnings: Bleak adult themes throughout; sexual content; despair, humiliation, and social alienation; some disturbing imagery

The M rating is earned. These are uncompromising, often grim adult stories.

Story Overview

Abandon the Old in Tokyo is one of several Drawn & Quarterly volumes (edited and designed by cartoonist Adrian Tomine) that collected Tatsumi's short gekiga for English readers — this one gathering eight stories from around 1970. There's no continuous narrative; each piece is a self-contained portrait, usually of an ordinary, defeated man on the margins of Japan's economic miracle.

The recurring subject is alienation. Tatsumi's protagonists are sewer workers, laborers, low-level employees, men trapped by obligation, poverty, or their own thwarted desires while Tokyo modernizes and prospers around them without including them. The title story draws on the old legend of ubasute — abandoning the aged to die — to tell of a man worn down by the burden of caring for his elderly mother as he tries to build his own life. Others trade in sexual frustration, humiliation, quiet violence, and the grinding indignity of being left behind by progress. The tone is unflinching and pessimistic, the endings rarely offer redemption, and the cumulative effect is a damning portrait of the human cost of postwar Japan's boom. This is "slice of life" only in the bleakest sense — slices of lives no one wanted to look at.

Characters

The defeated men — Tatsumi's stories are populated by a recurring archetype: the ordinary, powerless man crushed by circumstance, desire, or duty. They aren't heroes or even especially sympathetic; they're studies in alienation, rendered with unsparing honesty. The point is not any single character but the pattern they form.

Postwar Tokyo itself — The booming, modernizing city functions as the collection's true antagonist: a society racing toward prosperity that has no place for the men in these pages, and whose progress is built on their invisibility.

What I Love About It

It proves, completely, what Tatsumi's whole career argued for: that comics could carry the weight of serious, uncomfortable adult literature. There's no fantasy, no wish-fulfillment, no comfort — just clear-eyed, compassionate-but-merciless attention to people the booming economy chewed up. The art is plain and grounded, the storytelling economical and devastating. As social criticism it's bracing; as craft it's a masterclass in the short-story form. Having read his memoir first, seeing the actual gekiga delivered on the ambition he spent his youth fighting for is genuinely powerful.

Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

The title story, "Abandon the Old in Tokyo," in which a man caring for his burdensome elderly mother is pulled between filial duty and his desire for his own independent life and a future with a woman — and the bleak, ubasute-echoing place that conflict leads him. Tatsumi refuses any sentimental resolution; the story sits in the genuine moral horror of a man weighing his mother's life against his own freedom, and the ending lands like a stone. It's the collection's thesis in miniature: ordinary people pushed by circumstance to the edge of something unforgivable, observed without judgment and without mercy.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Historically essential gekiga from a master of the form
• Powerful, unsentimental social criticism
• Economical, devastating short-story craft
• A perfect companion to A Drifting Life

Cons

• Relentlessly bleak — no comfort or uplift anywhere
• The plain 1970s art and grim subject matter are an acquired taste
• Mature content and despair make it a demanding read, not a casual one

Is Abandon the Old in Tokyo Worth Reading?

Yes — for readers who want serious, literary, historically important comics and can handle unrelenting bleakness. It's a cornerstone of adult manga in English. If you want anything warm, look elsewhere; if you want to understand what gekiga achieved, start here.

Where to Buy

Read the first volume. If it doesn't hook you, put it down. It'll hook you.

Start with Volume 1 →

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