Drawn in 1971 and 1972, these stories expand Yoshihiro Tatsumi's vocabulary for characters contextualized by themes of depravity and disorientation in twentieth-century Japan. Some of the tales focus on the devastation the country felt as a result of World War II: in one story a man devotes twenty years to preserving the memory of those killed at Hiroshima, only to discover a horrible misconception at the heart of his tribute. Tatsumi's characters muddle through isolated despair and fleeting pleasure to live out their darkly nuanced lives.
