AnimeNewsNetwork has confirmed with Drawn & Quarterly that the company will be releasing a new Yoshihiro Tatsumi collection of short stories titled Fallen Words. A listing for the book originally popped up on Amazon.ca, followed shortly there-after by Amazon.com.
“In Fallen Words, Yoshihiro Tatsumi takes up the oral tradition of rakugo and breathes new life into it by shifting the format from spoken word to manga. Each of the eight stories in the collection is lifted from the Edo-era Japanese storytelling form. As Tatsumi notes in the afterword, the world of rakugo, filled with mystery, emotion, revenge, hope, and, of course, love, overlaps perfectly with the world of Gekiga that he has spent the better part of his life developing.”
News of a fresh Yoshihiro Tatsumi license comes with perfect timing for me – I just finished his one-shot Black Blizzard and revisited his sprawling and wonderful, A Drifting Life. Both are different kinds of stories but each left me wanting more of the creator’s work. You can expect I’ll be picking up this new book when it’s released this Spring.