At age 14, bored with the latest superhero editions, the precocious comic artist Adrian Tomine suffered a "crisis of faith." In his introduction to Yoshihiro Tatsumi's The Push Man and Other Stories, Tomine describes how discovering Tatsumi's work "re-ignited my passion for comics." In tribute to his idol, Tomine has edited the first English-language collection of Tatsumi's terse and gritty tales from the late 1960s.

In an illuminating interview with Tomine, Tatsumi reveals that he draws his inspiration from police reports and human-interest pieces in the newspaper. In 1957, while working as a manga publisher, Tatsumi coined the term gekiga to describe comics, including his own, whose brutal realism distinguished them from the fantastical, youth-appealing stories of manga. Tatsumi's timeless, and mordant, portrayal of modern urban life and its sordid underbelly remains strictly for adults.

Limited to eight pages by the men's mag where he originally published, Tatsumi learned to craft economical narratives rendered in drawings as efficient as his characters' abrupt dialogue. Each of these 16 tragic tales, first published in 1969, features a male protagonist with a working-class job — factory employee, mechanic, sewer worker — or no job at all, who is beset with a deep-seated rage. Their wives, lovers, and girlfriends, who work as barmaids, prostitutes, or office clerks, are the frequent victims of male aggression, both from their partners as well as their lecherous employers. In "Black Smoke," an impotent sanitation worker flies into a rage when he spies his unfaithful wife leaving an abortion clinic. As vengeance, he incinerates their apartment while she naps. From a distant hillside, where he ventures to watch the conflagration, he remarks: "It's a filthy city. Everything here is trash. Eventually someone's gotta burn it."

Tatsumi depicts the unnatural conditions of city life and the concomitant degradation of human dignity and morals: rats invade apartments, women discard babies into the sewers, and a man kills another to steal his concubine. The lone bright spot comes in the curious tale "Make-Up," where a married, cross-dressing office employee falls in love with a young trophy wife, who loves him as a woman.

-H.G. Masters