Books

The Translator Without Talent

by Ryan Holmberg

Despite having only two dozen manga translations, 80 essays, 50 reviews, one exhibition pamphlet, and zero solo-authored books to his name, Ryan Holmberg, PhD, is widely regarded as the biggest fish in the puddle-sized sea of alternative manga in the Anglosphere. Fresh off a major professional setback, in 2017 Dr. Holmberg departed for a two-year stint as a Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, where he would commence to document his research findings, translation troubles, and escapades with aging manga artists in a series of detailed Instagram posts @mangaberg. Since returning to the United States in the fall of 2019, Dr. Holmberg has continued to undermine his academic career as a so-called “comics scholar” by spending way more time than he should, and sharing more about his personal life than he should, on his Instagram account.

Collecting nearly 400 pages’ worth of behind-the-scenes peeks into the nitty-gritty of manga research—as well as a never before published manifesto of Dr. Mangaberg’s musings about comics translation—THE TRANSLATOR WITHOUT TALENT is a tell-all slog through two-plus years of activity of your favorite nose-in-the-mud manga scholar. This genre-defying volume spotlights some of the best and weirdest alt-manga and gekiga artists, with extended tangents into the politics of nuclear power and social discrimination in Japan. It is perfect for anyone obsessed with obscure, amazing, and all-too-frequently retrograde manga, but does not have the patience to scroll through a lengthy Instagram feed. Comics studies has never before seen anything like THE TRANSLATOR WITHOUT TALENT, and it may never again. Published by the comics and manga fanzine BUBBLES in its first foray away from the xerox machine.

Praise for The Translator Without Talent

Not a comic, not even really an essay collection on comics so much as a tour of Holmberg’s last two years on fellowship in Japan, but man, is it an insightful look not just into how he translates and the history of what he translates but why he’s translating… It’s deeply refreshing to find a scholar invested examining and explaining the really radical stuff, from Katsumata Susumu’s anti-nuclear tracts to Kaihara Hiroshi’s unsparing political cartoons. It doesn’t hurt that Holmberg is funny and witty, or that he’s regularly getting pulled along by these artists on adventures to nightclubs and neighborhood watering holes.
—Austin Price, The Comics Journal

He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid

by Tsuge Yoshiharu

translated with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid captures a midcareer author taking stock of his anxieties while connecting the dots between his seemingly monotonous present and complicated past. Returning to the narrative formulas he honed in previous works, Tsuge crafts stories of tall tales exchanged between fellow travelers and macabre parables tinged with magical realism. And yet, this volume also contains the most surreal and transgressive stories of Tsuge's career. Translated by Ryan Holmberg, He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid is a tour de force of creative experiments bolstered by a veteran storyteller's incisive observations about people at their most human.

By the mid-seventies, Yoshiharu Tsuge had settled into married life and parenthood, while reaping the financial and cultural recognition of his previous works. But psychological troubles simmered beneath the surface, reaching an unsettling crescendo in a series of nightmarish fantasies, expressed powerfully through experimentation with different visual styles. This is the fifth volume of seven surveying the work of one of manga's most important artists.

Face Meat

by Bonten Taro

translated by Ryan Holmberg, with an essay by Kunisawa Hiroshi

A headless busty blonde, a face-stealing psychopath, a sleazy serial-killer sculptor, a horny handsome hunchback, a vengeful caterpillar cuckold, a torturous hangover in the pits of hell…

Welcome to the raunchy and gristly world of FACE MEAT, from the decadent imagination of outlaw polymath Bonten Taro—ex-kamikaze, ex-yakuza, singer, songwriter, actor, world-famous tattooist, husband of seven, and underappreciated pioneer of “pinky violence” femme fatales and adult horror manga. While Mizuki Shigeru and Umezz Kazuo were paving the way for horror in shonen and shojo magazines in the 1960s, Bonten was secretly doing the same in erotic men’s rags—and the results are as trashy as you’d expect!

With an essay by Bonten booster and B-gekiga expert Kunisawa Hiroshi, FACE MEAT includes fourteen hair- and pants-raising stories that have never before been assembled under a single cover in any language! FACE MEAT is the fourth volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga, curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg.

Red Night

by Hanawa Kazuichi

translated by Ryan Holmberg, with an essay by Akasegawa Genpei

Hanawa Kazuichi (b. 1947) is a pioneer of the erotic grotesque and folk horror in manga. Since his debut in the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo in 1971, Hanawa has been channeling perverse and atavistic evils from the abject depths of Japanese history and culture.

Published in 1985, Red Night was Hanawa’s breakout book in Japan. This translation of the expanded edition is his first in English since Doing Time (2006), about the artist’s imprisonment for illegal possession of a firearm. Come, dare soak your soul in Red Night! Another underground manga classic from publisher Breakdown Press.

Mansect

by Koga Shinichi

translated by Ryan Holmberg

Humans grow and age. They change. But always we are the same person, the same creature. Not so with insects, whose powers of metamorphosis alter not only their shape and size, but also their very beings. And now, because of one young man’s unhealthy obsession with bugs, humans also find themselves transformed into disgusting, decrepit, bloodsucking insect monsters!

Published in 1975, Koga Shinichi’s MANSECT is a shonen horror classic by one of the undisputed masters of the genre. Swarming with mesmerizingly gnarly imagery and freakish bio-evolutionary speculation, Koga here demonstrates why his name is uttered with the same quivering reverence as horror manga legends Mizuki Shigeru, Umezz Kazuo, and Ito Junji. MANSECT is the third volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga, curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg.

Supplemental Essay 

Beautiful Monster

by Maruo Suehiro

translated by Ryan Holmberg

Love him or hate him, Japanese subculture would not be the same without him. Prepare yourself for Maruo Suehiro’s Beautiful Monster, a selection of sixteen brutally ecstatic stories, mainly from the early 1980s, by Japan’s undisputed master of erotic horror.

Maruo is globally recognized as the master of the erotic grotesque in Japanese art and comics. Since his debut in 1980, his exquisite and often shocking imagery has titillated readers of alternative, pornographic, and young adult manga. His other books in English include the impossible-to-find cult classics Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show (1993) and Ultra-Gash Inferno (2001), and the award-winning The Strange Tale of Panorama Island (2013). FOR ADULTS ONLY.

Flash Point

by Imai Arata

translated by Ryan Holmberg

One hot summer day, a Japanese teenager stops going to school. As a harmless joke, she and her sister's unemployed husband start making silly videos on Instagram, generating millions of views. But when they photobomb a political rally held by former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, the fun and games suddenly veer in a scary and surreal direction...

By the author of the critically acclaimed, post-Fukushima dystopia F, Imai Arata's Flash Point dares to tread upon taboo territory avoided by all but the most courageous and foolish of Japanese artists. Includes an interview with the artist led by Zach Godin and Ryan Holmberg.

UFO Mushroom Invasion

by Shirakawa Marina

translated by Ryan Holmberg, with an essay by Udagawa Takeo

"UFOs are one of the world's greatest mysteries...and I hope they stay that way. For the day that aliens reveal themselves may very well mark the beginning of the end of life on Earth as we know it!"

A flying saucer crashes deep in the mountains of Japan. Wary of the hyper-intelligent beings they find inside, the government hides from the public all news of the alien craft. But it’s not the strange visitors themselves whom they should be afraid of—the real danger is the parasitic spores smuggled aboard! Will Earth survive the UFO MUSHROOM INVASION?!

Originally published in 1976, Shirakawa Marina’s UFO MUSHROOM INVASION is a masterpiece of sci-fi horror. Drawing on his deep knowledge of Japanese folklore and the supernatural, Shirakawa created one of manga history’s cult classics and an unforgettably creepy entry in the canon of spore-horror. With an essay by weirdologist Udagawa Takeo, UFO MUSHROOM INVASION is the second volume of SMUDGE, a line of vintage horror, occult, and dark fantasy manga, curated and translated by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg.

Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke

by Sugiura Shigeru

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Ninja! Samurai! Cowboys! Aliens! Amoebas! Join Japan’s favorite ninja, Sarutobi Sasuke, on this psychedelic romp across a land beyond time by the legendary manga author and Pop Art pioneer Sugiura Shigeru.

In this 1969 take on the beloved ninja, the carefree young Sasuke pranks his way through a radically reimagined old Japan, opening wormholes to America’s Wild West and outer space as he goes. This wild adventure overflows with eye-popping sights: UFOs, absurd monsters, Hollywood stars, gun-toting outlaws, submarines, towering mushroom clouds, and much more.

Available for the first time in English and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg, Ninja Sarutobi Sasuke is a must-read for its trippy visuals and outrageous storytelling.

Oba Electroplating Factory

by Tsuge Yoshiharu

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Alt-manga legend Tsuge Yoshiharu strikes out on his own, creating some of his most revealing and personal works.

Oba Electroplating Factory is a captivating portrait of mid-century Japan in its most unglamorous nooks and crannies. Glimpses of the artist reflecting upon his life, his work, and his contemporaries pepper the fictional landscape: a wife teases her husband about a former fling on a trip to the hot springs, a young cartoonist is aghast at the cavalier conduct of his seniors, while imperfect men grapple with the discomfort of their own honesty.

Following the breakthrough success of the cult classic Nejishiki, Tsuge forged a path for autobiographical fiction in manga, changing the cultural landscape of comics forever. Originally published between 1973 and 1974, the stories of this volume capture Tsuge at his most personal and revealing, including his first attempts at writing for a mainstream adult audience. Tsuge’s humanistic stories are also studies in staging nature, evoking stillness and movement in such a way that renders his chosen settings characters all on their own.

Translated by Ryan Holmberg, this fourth volume in the complete mature works of the legendary mangaka is an indispensable addition to the literary comics canon and a shining example of world literature at its most human.

Second Hand Love

by Yamada Murasaki

translated by Ryan Holmberg

Through a cracked door, heartsick Emi hears a playful growl. Cautiously, she lets her lover in—a wolf of a man wielding a bouquet of roses. His shoulders must have been four inches wider than mine. As I stood behind him, I fantasized about the broadness of his chest and the thickness of his neck…and about becoming his mistress once again.

And so their story goes. For a young woman interested in love without the hassle of a traditional relationship, an affair with someone else’s spoiled husband is just what she ordered—until it’s time to move on.

Then there’s Yuko: with even less time for married men’s shenanigans, she turns her attention to her aging father and the guilt of adultery that has gnawed at his heart for years. Her mother is long dead, yet her memory is enshrined for eternity in their—father’s and daughter’s—mirrored indiscretions.

Drawn soon after the critically-acclaimed Talk to My Back, the two stories in Second Hand Love mark the triumphant return of Yamada Murasaki, one of literary manga’s most respected feminist voices. Translated by noted historian Ryan Holmberg, this edition includes an interview with the artist from the height of her career in 1985, where her wit and wisdom are on shimmering display.

Her Frankenstein

by Kawashima Norikazu

translated by Ryan Holmberg, with an essay by Kawakatsu Tokushige

Dare to read the psycho-horror classic that horror manga master Ito Junji called a “frightening but moving story about an unfortunate individual who, lost in search of his true self, finds his own annihilation instead.”

Little Tetsuo is a wimpy mess. His parents don’t love him. He meets the beautiful Kimiko, an ailing teenage girl obsessed with movies and mayhem in equal amounts. She doesn’t love Tetsuo either, or anyone other than herself. But she needs him. So Tetsuo becomes the man she wants—the monster she wants. He becomes HER FRANKENSTEIN!

Originally published in 1986, Kawashima Norikazu’s HER FRANKENSTEIN marks the bizarre and sadomasochistic finale to a cult era in Japanese horror comics. A few years after it was published, the author burned all of his artwork and abandoned Tokyo, never to be heard from again! HER FRANKENSTEIN is the inaugural volume of SMUDGE, a line of pulp, horror, and dark mystery manga, curated and translated into English by award-winning historian Ryan Holmberg.

Igaguri: Young Judo Master

by Fukui Eiichi

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

THE ORIGINAL MARTIAL ARTS MANGA! Starring a young judo prodigy who is as virtuous as he is strong, Fukui Eiichi's Igaguri (1952-54) marks the true beginning of dynamic martial arts and sports comics in Japan. For the first time in English, read the manga that revolutionized shonen manga, reignited interest in judo among Japanese kids, and drove god of manga Tezuka Osamu mad with jealousy. With a dojo-busting essay about Fukui's life and Igaguri's impact by award-winning historian and translator Ryan Holmberg, this edition is a must-have for all manga fans!

Trailblazer of postwar shonen manga, Fukui Eiichi was born in Tokyo in 1921. After a career as an animator during and after World War II, Fukui redefined how manga were drawn and written with his best-selling Igaguri for the magazine Adventure King. Due to poor health and overwork, he died suddenly at the height of his career at the age of 33, yet his influence continues to shape martial arts and sports comics to today.

I Wish I Was Stupid

by Ebisu Yoshikazu

translated by Ryan Holmberg

Ebisu Yoshikazu. Television star, father of three, professional gambler, writer, cartoonist, pioneer. Since his debut in the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo in 1973, ugly-but-amazing “heta-uma” superstar Ebisu has been spinning out surreal nightmares that combine the edgiest styles of Tokyo’s artistic counterculture with the absurd and infuriating realities of modern life.

Originally published in 1982, I Wish I Was Stupid surpasses in shamelessness the artist’s cult classic Pits of Hell. With 13 stories about love, family, work and raging frustration culled from avant-garde porn mags and Garo, Ebisu probes dangerously deep into the inner mucosal of the human condition. If you’ve ever considered setting your child on fire, pooping with double buttholes, or windmilling your dingdong, this book is for you.

Nejishiki

by Tsuge Yoshiharu

translated with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Nejishiki represents the pinnacle of avant-garde manga. Originally published in the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo in 1968, the title story marks cult cartoonist Tsuge Yoshiharu’s radical turn to dreams, surrealism, and existential horror. Tsuge’s literary landscapes were once lush and inviting; now they are shadowy and haunted. His cheery travelers have lost their innocence; they have been replaced by alienated wanderers pursued by menacing doppelgangers, unsavory sexual impulses, and omens of death. The psychologically and erotically charged stories collected here revolutionized manga, galvanized Japanese comics criticism, and stand as some of the strangest fruits of the countercultural discontent of the late ’60s. They remain just as shocking and vivid today.

Translated with an extensive historical essay by Ryan Holmberg detailing Tsuge’s personal life, cartooning practice, and intellectual milieu, and the impact of his manga on contemporary Japanese culture.

Praise for Nejishiki

While the first two books [in D&Q’s Tsuge series] proved surprising, it’s the third volume, the just-released “Nejishiki,” that is the throttler, the book I’ve really been waiting for. It’s here that Tsuge throws open his inner gates of possibility and lets the world rush in with all its complexity, humanity, beauty, uncertainty, and violence. The experimentation and dreamlike nature of the title story, first published in 1968, cemented Tsuge’s Japanese fame (for we 50-year-behinders, the adjective “Lynchian” applies), deploying shifting drawing styles and, perhaps most important, capturing the ineffable architecture of memory.
—Chris Ware, The Washington Post

My Picture Diary

by Fujiwara Maki

translated with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

In 1981, Fujiwara Maki began a picture diary about daily life with her son and husband, the legendary manga author Tsuge Yoshiharu. Publishing was not her original intention. “I wanted to record our family’s daily life while our son, Shosuke, was small. But as 8mm cameras were too expensive and we were poor, I decided on the picture diary format instead. I figured Shosuke would enjoy reading it when he got older.”

Drawn in a simple, personable style, and covering the same years fictionalized in Tsuge’s final masterpiece The Man Without Talent, Fujiwara’s journal focuses on the joys of daily life amidst the stresses of childrearing, housekeeping, and managing a depressed husband. A touching and inspiring testimony of one Japanese woman’s resilience, My Picture Diary is also an important glimpse of the enigma that is Tsuge. Fujiwara’s diary is unsparing. It provides a stark picture of the gender divide in their household: Tsuge sleeps until noon and does practically nothing. He never compliments her cooking, and dictates how money is spent. Not once is he shown drawing. And yet, Fujiwara remains surprisingly empathetic toward her mercurial husband.

Translated by Ryan Holmberg, this edition sheds light on Fujiwara’s life, her own career in art, writing, and underground theater, and her extensive influence upon her husband’s celebrated manga.

Praise for My Picture Diary

Maki’s illustrations are full of charm and pathos; her notes, in turn funny, tragic, and arresting. “Daily life typically just passes by in a haze,” she writes in the afterword. “But strangely, once I started drawing this picture diary, events of significance to us as a family began to accumulate.”
—Lily Houston Smith, Oprah Daily

Winner of the 2024 Eisner Award for Best US Edition of International Material, Asia

Boat Life, vol. 1

by Tsuge Tadao

translated with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Based loosely on manga pioneer Tsuge Tadao’s own daily life, Boat Life follows novelist Tsuda Kenta on his hapless pursuit of reprieve and reverie on a homely houseboat on the Tonegawa River near Tokyo. Across a series of magical absurdist quests, this charming graphic novel stars a panoply of personable characters, including a drunkard fisherman, a pervy monk, a talking corpse, and the protagonist’s loving yet wary wife and son.

A late-career classic from the cult creator of Trash Market and Slum Wolf, Boat Life offers a relaxed take on aging and the grind of work and family, and a philosophical elaboration of themes Tsuge Tadao has been exploring since his debut in the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo in the late 1960s. This edition features a 27-page essay section including “Garo Gone Fishin’” by translator Ryan Holmberg and two essays by Tsuge Tadao.

Baby Boom

by Yokoyama Yuichi

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

Yokoyama Yuichi's comics are entirely unique: free from the traditional modes of narrative, his work explores motion, sound and structure, generating striking, beautifully graphic stories that propel the reader into a world of onomatopoeia, speed, and visual noise. Collecting 39 short pieces, each drawn with bright markers, Baby Boom uses polychromy in symbolic and rhythmic ways to create a musical, visually extraordinary experience.

Baby Boom is the latest in Breakdown Press’s line of English language editions of work by influential Japanese artist Yokoyama Yuichi. With a cover design by Jean-Philippe Bretin, an essay by manga scholar Ryan Holmberg, and an interview with Yokoyama himself, this new English language edition, masterfully printed using Pantone spot colours, brings together Yokoyama’s most ground-breaking work to date.

Praise for Baby Boom

Baby Boom is a book about how the world is a beautiful place, how living in it can be a very wonderful thing, and how the presence of others is what keeps happiness alive in us.
—Matt Seneca, The Comics Journal

Plaza

by Yokoyama Yuichi

translated by Ryan Holmberg

Bigger, bolder, and louder than ever before, neo-manga artist Yokoyama Yuichi is back in English with PLAZA! Inspired by Carnaval in Brazil, PLAZA offers a maniacal extravaganza of marching, dancing, leaping, firing, cheering, smashing, and exploding over the course of 225 eye-and-eardrum-confounding pages. Originally published in Japan in 2019, this English edition of PLAZA brings to full, hyper-animated life the spectacular graphic art of this genre-defying work of avant-garde comics. Translated by noted manga scholar Ryan Holmberg, this edition also includes the most extended and informative interview with the artist to date. Not only is PLAZA Yokoyama's loudest book, it is also one of his largest! At 8.25" x 11.5", this oversize tome will bombard you with every detail of PLAZA's eyeball-smashing glory.

Praise for Plaza

Art and literature historians of the future will be flabbergasted that Yokoyama Yuichi existed in our time. He is a visionary on the level of William Blake. PLAZA is a parade of invention, set to the beat of turning pages.
—Dash Shaw, author of Discipline, BodyWorld, director of Cryptozoo

A dazzling sensory barrage of speeding lines and swoops! Witness the torrent of joyous spectacle, the inner workings of a cosmic parade machine!
—Lale Westvind, author of Grip, Grand Electric Thought Power Mother

If the action of the comics form is a machine, PLAZA is like one of the doomsday devices that Jack Kirby would devote full pages to, bristling with dials and vents and gauges. Everything we see on these pages is always in motion, constantly followed up by something else just as dynamic. Yokoyama [possesses] the fine artist's ability to evoke a truly engrossing visual world with a single image.
—Matt Seneca, The Comics Journal

Talk To My Back

by Yamada Murasaki

translated and with an essay by Ryan Holmberg

A celebrated masterwork shimmering with vulnerability from one of alt-manga's most important female artists. “Now that we've woken from the dream, what are we going to do?" Chiharu thinks to herself, rubbing her husband's head affectionately. Set in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Tokyo, Yamada Murasaki's Talk To My Back (1981-84) explores the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams through a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, and with her husband, who works late and sees his wife as little more than a domestic servant. While engaging frankly with the compromises of marriage and motherhood, Yamada remains generous with the characters who fetter her protagonist. When her husband has an affair, Chiharu feels that she, too, has broken the marital contract by straying from the template of the happy housewife. Yamada saves her harshest criticisms for society at large, particularly its false promises of eternal satisfaction within the nuclear family—as fears of having been "thrown away inside that empty vessel called the household" gnaw at Chiharu's soul.

Yamada Murasaki was the first cartoonist in Japan to use the expressive freedoms of alt-manga to address domesticity and womanhood in a realistic, critical, and sustained way. A watershed work of literary manga, Talk To My Back was serialized in the influential magazine Garo in the early 1980s. Translated with a career-spanning historical essay by Ryan Holmberg.

Praise for Talk To My Back

These tales of thwarted-ness and domestic ennui were written in the ‘80s, but Japan being what it is...their atmosphere often feels much closer to that of the ‘50s or early ‘60s. At moments, it’s almost as if Murasaki has set out to fictionalise Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. If her stories are pensive to the point of dreaminess, they’re also full of frustration, a discontent that simmers like a hot pan… The result is a cross-cultural book about female self-worth–about where it comes from and why it sometimes disappears–that stands the test of time in the most remarkable way.
—Rachel Cooke, The Guardian