An old man is reduced by the debt that has ruined him to performing like a dog ("Why don't you spin around three times and bark?"). He later finds relief performing with a dog. A younger man consumes an eel that, until captured, had swum free in the city's sewers. A woman, face and breasts destroyed by botched cosmetic surgery, gets revenge on the men she had hoped to please with her altered features. A man who works among the consumer goods that urban Japanese have discarded hears a coworker say, "People get rid of anything old," before going home to his aged and incontinent mother. A pet monkey is murdered when thrown together with his fellow primates at the zoo.
The above is a sampling of the bleakness one will encounter in "Abandon the Old in Tokyo," the second collection of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's work to be made available in English. Readers familiar with the first, "The Push Man and Other Stories," will not be surprised by the tone. Tatsumi is again writing about those members of Japanese society who would never soar with the bubble that had, when these stories first appeared, begun to inflate.
"Economic development was considered more important than the way people actually lived their lives," Tatsumi remembers of that time, and this goes a long way toward explaining his view of the world.
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