Susumu Katsumata Short Story Collection (勝又進短編集)

The following images are from the Japanese avant-garde manga publisher Seirindo's 1976 short story collection from mangaka Susumu Katsumata (勝又進, 1943-2007) who is best known for his delicate rural-life oriented work done for the famous gekiga magazine Garo (1964-2002). This special collection was a limited edition project with only 1000 copies having been printed. The cover image is taken from it's first publication on the front of the March 1972 issue of Garo (no. 103)

On the front of the box, a monk can be seen holding a lantern in the woods at night.  A camellia bush swarms a tree to his right behind him while a egret stands to his left. At his feat several egret chicks wander around the dimly lit forest floor. The back of the box contains a bordered image of a kappa standing in a  dark green swamp upon a half submerged wheel. The kappa has a vine tied around its hand acting as a fishing rod. Within the border surrounding the image a hungry fish can be seen eyeing the reed, ready to bite.

From his posthumously published nuclear critique in Fukushima Devil Fish (2011) to the folkloric tour de force Red Snow (2005) Susumu Katsumata  was a mangaka like no other. Born in 1943, Miyagi prefecture, Japan, Katsumata he spent most of his childhood under the care of his older sister. In 1965 while earning a bachelors in physics at the Tokyo University of Education, Katsumata  stumbled upon a call for comics from the then one year old legendary gekiga magazine: Garo. Throughout his time publishing shorts in Garo and other avant-garde anthologies such as Comic Baku (1984-87) Katsumata would go on to establish himself as a master of the rural. His work frequently taking on creatures from Japan's long history of folklore, a world where mischievous tanuki played tricks on village people and vulgar Kappa wandered the countryside. From the 80s forward Katsumata was a frequent critic of nuclear energy, working as both an original and commissioned illustrator for anti-nuclear educational books and comics. While relatively obscure in the west, Katsumata's short body of work and delicate style leave his short stories long lasting and influential. The march 1969, Garo #67 was specially dedicated to him and  in 2006 one year before his death of malignant melanoma at the age of 63 Katsumata was awarded one of the highest honors in manga, the Grand Prize of the Japan Cartoonist Association Award for the collection of his earlier work, Red Snow.

Although Katsumata is no longer with us, and the times depicted remain ever fleeting in the digitized humanity, his work remains timeless. Like the tanuki that permeate his tales; Katsumata has spun an incredible trick.