Sensei Tatsumi Has Passed Away

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, the father of ‘gekiga’, the darker, less traditional and more dramatic form of Japanese manga, passed away on March 7. He was 79.

The sad news came via an email from Singapore filmmaker Eric Khoo, who directed the award-winning Tatsumi animated film. “Sensei passed away today,” Khoo wrote in his email to journalist Paul Gravett last Saturday.

The Tatsumi film was an adaptation of Mr Tatsumi’s most acclaimed and influential work, A Drifting Life, an 840-page autobiographical manga about his own struggles during the post-WWII era.

You can read Paul Gravett’s article about Yoshihiro Tatsumi, including an interview with Eric Khoo, right here.