The Groundbreaking Female Artist Who Shaped Manga History

Tsurita, however, had little interest in creating work that upheld gender norms. Although shōjo would become more complex and even transgressive in the ’70s, Tsurita viewed it in the ’60s as a category both limited and limiting. She liked comics aimed at men and craved the freedom to write and draw whatever she wished. She had nearly given up, though, when Garo appeared in 1964. An alt-manga magazine that explicitly offered amateur artists a space to try out aesthetic experiments, Garo became her comics’ home base until her death in 1985 from lupus. The magazine gave Tsurita room to publish the dark, dreamlike work that she desired.

Her iconoclastic work is the subject of a new book, The Sky Is Blue With a Single Cloud, a career-spanning collection of Tsurita’s comics, released this summer by Drawn & Quarterly. The first authorized anthology to showcase Tsurita’s work in English, it includes an exhaustively researched afterword by Ryan Holmberg (adapted and expanded from a shorter piece by Mitsuhiro Asakawa). The essay, which recounts the story of young Tsurita’s letter in great detail, seeks to explain her place in the heavily gendered world of Japanese manga, particularly alternative or alt-manga. While the comics assembled here are uneven in quality, and though the introductory essay may seem intimidatingly academic to readers unfamiliar with early manga, the book is overall a fantastic, continually surprising look at one of Japan’s most innovative—and least remembered—manga artists.

Tsurita was the only woman consistently published in Garo in its early years, and what made her stand out even more was the literariness of her best work. “There weren’t … that many female cartoonists back then, so you have to understand how special she was for that reason alone,” Garo’s co-founder, publisher, and head editor, Katsuichi Nagai, reflected in 1982. Later, he added that what set Tsurita apart from other women mangaka of the era, such as Masako Watanabe or Hideko Mizuno, was that she was clearly “trying to make manga like works of literature.” Some of Tsurita’s cartoons were akin to gekiga, an intensely personal form pioneered by Yoshihiro Tatsumi that often read like snapshots of a life, but many of her comics broke genre barriers altogether.

As Holmberg catalogs throughout his essay, Tsurita’s art shifted over the course of her career, betokening her many cross-cultural influences. In some early comics, such as “Nonsense” (1966), a circular tale about a man who kills evildoers because he thinks that is his God-given duty, Tsurita’s art appears simple, almost crude. By contrast, “Woman,” from later that year, with its stunning black-and-white backgrounds and near-complete lack of dialogue, hearkens to the modernist wordless novels of Lynd Ward in the early 20th century. As Holmberg speculates, the manga’s lushly illustrated design was likely a response to Young Aphrodites (1963), a Greek art-house film that featured similar characters and settings.

Other manga, such as “Money” (1974) and “Max” (1975), portray languid, cigarette-smoking, black-clad women who often look as though they could have been drawn by Marjane Satrapi—albeit with sharp lines and shading that seem to echo Tsurita’s interest in the German artist Käthe Kollwitz. The collection’s titular comic features a haunting Grecian landscape reminiscent of the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, and an androgynous figure who rides a motorcycle through a seemingly empty world toward a cloud: a mushroom-shaped mass, rendered across a large, stunningly shaded panel. Later pieces, such as “The Sea Snake and the Big Dipper,” resemble the fantastical, seductive illustrations of the fin de siècle artist Aubrey Beardsley, whose style Tsurita admired. The quality of Tsurita’s late work is remarkable, given how severely lupus ravaged her ability to draw; before her death, she was barely able to finish tracing the lines of her panels.