Fallen Words - Reviews

This collection of stories draws from the traditional practice of rakugo. The ancient verbal story-telling tradition typically involves a long, complex narrative that seems serious throughout only to end with an often cheesy comic punchline. That's basically what you have here in these eight stories from gekiga godfather Tatsumi Yoshihiro, two dozen pages of build-up to get to a payoff that seems like it belong in a 4-koma.

Therein lies the problem. The visual style is pure gekiga classic (obviously, given the author/illustrator) but it doesn't bring with it any of the gekiga narrative heft. Trying to find a visual medium to represent rakugo is a laudible goal, but it probably should have been left in the hands of someone with more comic credentials. In the end, I found it a struggle to read through these shorts in a single sitting.

As a big fan of Pushman and Abandon the Old in Tokyo, I was pretty disappointed by this line in in an otherwise flawless oeuvre. It's probably better to approach this collection as an experimental manga, more significant for what it tried to do than what it actually accomplished.