(extracted from The Newspaper of University Tokai,20th April 1996)

---

A TSUGE Yoshiharu is a very attractive Comics-Writer.
Most of Comics-writers will give the readers laugh, hope,
bravery and satire by drawing their heroes or heroines to
overcome a variety of the difficulties. But TSUGE's comics
are basically different from them.
TUGE would like to draw the negative aspects of life,
therefore the characters he draws in his works are all
poor, miserable and wretched. His stories are perhapps
neither interesting nor exciting to the young people. It's
because of his sense of values or his view of life, which
could be called nihilism.
The hero in the series of ISHIYA(stoneseller) is often called "a worm"
or "an useless incompetent man" even by his wife, but he would reply
nothing to her. Because he has already originally contradicted worldly
honor, wealth and desire. He has denied thoroughly worldly values.
What he wants to affirm I think is just only the fact of life in itself.
The existence of the stones, which he picks up from the nearby
riverbanks, is a symbol of the valueless, that is, the fact of life
in itself. So, it is indiffrent to him whether the stones will make
money, or not. It is important for him to affirm his own existece as
a simple fact like that of the stones.
Tsuge must have been surely influenced by the thoghts of "Zen" in Buddism.
I want foreigners to recognize that there are such splendid comics worthy
of reading as this in Japan.

---

* BACK TO THE ROOM FOR THE COMICS