Reviews

The Push Man and Other Stories by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

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jekutree's review against another edition

5.0

Brilliant.

Tatsumi goes against all manga conventions with this one. Manga has always been smaller in size than western comics and this of course leads to smaller panel counts. When a page is smaller, you can’t really fit as much onto the page. Until Tatsumi. Throughout, Tatsumi frequently employs pages with over 10 panels with incredible results. He typically uses a 4 row panel structure which is abnormal even for western comics.

Use of the medium aside, these stories all feel similar and tackle similar themes but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Tatsumi paints the lives of several blue collar workers who often don’t have much to say. They’re all repressed and all have little to no control of what happens around them. I’d compare Tatsumi’s Japan to the gritty 70’s New York portrayed in the films of that decade. And that’s a funny comparison too since these stories come from 1969.

whitecat5000's review against another edition

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dark emotional fast-paced

1.0

DNF. Too much rape, assault, and violence for me to want to finish.

600bars's review against another edition

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2.0

I get it man, life is full of misery. I know that WWII irrevocably changed everyone’s psyche, especially for Japan. But god I can’t really tolerate nihilism like this. Every man is a cucked incel loser, every woman is a whore who loves abortions. It’s verging on parody. Usually I read short story collections slowly so as to not blend them together but quickly I realized these are essentially the same. They almost always star a man who works a manual labor job like a sewer cleaner or factory worker or something of that nature. He’s bossed around at home by his bitch wife, who is usually a sex worker and also cruel to her husband. They only interact when they’re each about to head for work because they have opposite schedules. And yes each story technically has different characters but the image of the wife/gf still in bed when he gets home or her getting ready to leave when he is getting ready for bed is recurring. This is a sad truth of relationships where you both work. Even when you have the same schedule you’re either rushing around to leave the house or exhausted at the end of the day. It’s inhumane that we must live this way instead of spending quality time with each other. This is a true observation of the ways in which the necessity of earning a living causes fracturing in relationships when we are meant to lounge around together for far more time than we get.

But most of the stories devolve into such intense levels of misogyny that I can’t figure out what the social critique is supposed to be. I have a fairly high edgelord tolerance if it is saying something but this just seems to be hating women. It’s not even making a point about how devalued women are because the women are always so domineering to the men that you’re meant to feel for the pathetic sad sack men. Almost all of the guys work manual labor and their gfs are sex workers, so you see him work all day and get no love at the end of the day. Then she’s going out to fuck other men and he knows it. And it never seems to be out of economic desperation, it’s always that the woman loves this lifestyle and loves fucking other dudes PURELY to humiliate the man further after he’s already humiliated all day at work.

There are so many fetuses. One story features a sewer worker who opens a bag seeing a fetus and takes the rosary off of it in hopes of pawning the gold. He thoughtlessly throws the fetus back into the water. At the end of the story his mistress aborts their baby and he brings it down to the sewer and his coworker complains that it doesn’t have anything of value with it. They toss it in the water. The callousness and lack of regard for life throughout almost feels like anti-abortion pro-life propaganda.

The titular story, the Push Man, reminded me of a story in the Library by Chihoi which had a very similar story about teeming humanity in the subways.

There was a story about a man whose job is to disinfect telephones. It felt oddly familiar…. Then I remembered! I’ve been reading Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber and there was a whole footnote about telephone disinfectors. This was in reference to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There was even a Ringo Starr x Douglas Adams x someone from Monty Python collab in the works about telephone disinfectors. This was meant to illustrate a pointless person doing a pointless job that doesn’t need to be done. Honestly, even though I am only 90 pages into Bullshit Jobs it would be interesting to do a reading of these two books together. Graeber's book is about the psychosocial and spiritual degradation that comes with working a Bullshit Job– aka jobs that the worker themself knows are not necessary. He’s looking at the factors in society that lead to the proliferation of useless jobs, and wondering about the function they serve when they don’t make sense economically. Graeber brings up sex work later in the chapter, and has a subchapter on hit men, which are both recurrent professions in The Push Man. The thing is everyone in Push Man, from those who do jobs that are absolutely necessary for the functioning of society like a sewer cleaner, to those who have bullshit jobs like phone sanitizer, are all equally fucking miserable.

The only glimmer of cheer or hope in the whole book was, surprisingly, a translesbian romance that was pretty cute. It’s one of the only ones that doesn’t end with a newspaper headline about how the main character killed everyone and himself or whatever. It has the only happy ending in the collection. And it isn’t making a mockery of the cross dressing character even though this is from 1969. A diamond in the rough I suppose.

Yeah. I get that the world is full of murder rape organized crime sexual slavery suicide humiliation miserable marriages aborted babies etc. Despair is a very reasonable reaction to the way everything is. I don’t believe in looking away from the misery of the world; only escapism isn’t good either, but I also can’t figure out what the purpose of this is. This is too unwaveringly negative to even be a mirror of society. The last line of the book is from an interview with Adrien Tomine and Tatsumi says “Please don’t interpret these stories as reflective of the author’s personality”. I have another Tatsumi book on my hold shelf, and I was considering taking it off, but maybe I’ll give it a try.

I picked this up because of Adrian Tomine’s name on it. I really like Tomine’s work. It’s also super bleak and depressing and lonely and makes me feel nauseous but doesn’t feel as abject as this. Maybe it’s because Tomine’s work is bright and colorful. Maybe because Tomine’s subjects are suburban while Tatsumi’s are urban and working class. Perhaps my quasi suburbanite self couldn’t handle the GRITTINESS of REALITY. But no, I think I just can’t get past the depiction of women. It’s interesting to contrast The Push Man with From Hell, one of my favorite works of all time. From Hell depicts extremely graphic violence against women, who are also sex workers. But to me From Hell is one of the best explanations and indictments of misogyny I’ve ever read. It actually helped me understand misogyny in a new way. Here the women are so cold and bitter and cruel to the hardworking men it’s like he thinks they deserve the miserable lives they have. Idk I will report back when I read the second book on my shelf and I will try to keep Tatsumi’s wish in mind that this early work is not reflective of his later work.