Red Snow - Susumu Katsumata

Red Snow by Susumu Katsumata, translated by Taro Nettleton / ISBN 9781897299869 / 246-page hard cover from Drawn & Quarterly *** An award-winning book from a legendary manga artist Continuing D+Q's groundbreaking exploration of the fascinating world of Gekiga, this collection of short stories is drawn with great delicacy and told with subtle nuance by the legendary Japanese artist Susumu Katsumata. The setting is the premodern Japanese countryside of the author's youth, a slightly magical world where ancestral traditions hold sway over a people in the full vigor of life, struggling to survive the harsh seasons and the difficult life of manual laborers and farmers. While the world they inhabit has faded into memory and myth, the universal fundamental emotions of the human heart prevail at the center of these tender stories. Katsumata began publishing comic strips in the legendary avant-garde magazine Garo (which also published his contemporaries Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Yoshiharu Tsu