The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud

by Kuniko Tsurita, Ryan Holmberg (Translator)

Overview

The work of a visionary and iconoclastic feminist cartoonist—available in English for the first time

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud collects the best short stories from Kuniko Tsurita’s remarkable career. While the works of her male peers in literary manga are widely reprinted, this formally ambitious and poetic female voice is like none other currently available to an English readership. A master of the comics form, expert pacing and compositions combined with bold characters are signature qualities of Tsurita's work.

Tsurita’s early stories “Nonsense” and “Anti” provide a unique, intimate perspective on the bohemian culture and political heat of late 1960s and early ‘70s Tokyo. Her work gradually became darker and more surreal under the influence of modern French literature and her own prematurely failing health. As in works like “The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud” and “Max,” the gender of many of Tsurita's strong and sensual protagonists is ambiguous, marking an early exploration of gender fluidity. Late stories like "Arctic Cold" and "Flight" show the artist experimenting with more conventional narrative modes, though with dystopian themes that extend the philosophical interests of her early work.

An exciting and essential gekiga collection, The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud is translated by the comics scholar Ryan Holmberg and includes an afterword cowritten by Holmberg and manga editor Mitsuhiro Asakawa delineating Tsurita's importance and historical relevance.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781770463981
Publisher:	Drawn & Quarterly
Publication date:	07/07/2020
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	1,072,700
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Kuniko Tsurita was born in 1947 in Japan. In 1965, at age eighteen, while still in high school, she debuted in the legendary alt-manga monthly Garo, where she was the magazine’s first and only regular female contributor until the late 1970s. Tsurita’s early work reflects her interest in bohemian youth culture, while her later work became more surreal and dystopian, with influences ranging from modern French literature to the manga of her peers in Garo, including Yoshiharu Tsuge, Seiichi Hayashi, and Shigeru Mizuki, for whom she worked as an assistant for a short time in the late ‘60s. In 1973, Tsurita was diagnosed with lupus, at which point specters of death began to heavily shadow her work. She died in 1985 at age thirty-seven.

Editorial Reviews

★ 05/25/2020

This consummate collection of manga shorts by Tsurita (1947–1985), the first volume of her work to be translated into English, exemplifies how she stood out on the early alternative scene. While many of her themes echoed those of her male contemporaries—the political unrest of the 1960s, cynicism mixed with comedy, self-insertion of author as narrator—Tsurita’s work illuminated the lives and perspectives of women. “65121320262719,” for example, observes a woman on the edge of the student protests that dominated Japan in the period. The character’s male friends use her home as a base of operations, but she feels powerless to stand up to authority herself: “Like you said, I’m really just a law-abiding citizen at heart!” This cynical view of women’s place in progressive movements is juxtaposed against pieces that probe women’s interior lives, such as “Occupants,” which depicts two women, one androgynous, in a complicated sexual relationship, emphasized by turbulent ocean imagery. An extensive essay by Mitsuhiro Asakawa and Holmberg grants more insight into Tsurita’s life and how her diagnosis with lupus informed her pensive comics about death and dying, such as “Yuko’s Days” and “Arctic Cold.” Her artwork blends comedy with languid surrealism, as influenced by Shigeru Mizuki as it is by Aubrey Beardsley. Tsurita gets her due in this retrospective; though she died too young to see her legacy take hold, her place is akin to that of a Trina Robbins in the formation of indie manga, making this essential reading for fans of underground comics. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"A fantastic, continually surprising look at one of Japan’s most innovative—and least remembered—manga artists."
—The Atlantic

"Meticulously curated... The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud is a label-defying collection of Kuniko Tsurita's gekiga [that] explores the role of women through numerous shorts in unexpected formats."
—Shelf Awareness

"Tsurita gets her due in this retrospective... essential reading for fans of underground comics."
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

"The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud is a superb and beautiful collection, one worth repeated readings for pleasure and reflection alike. The Anglophone world owes thanks to those involved in its production that English speaking audiences will finally get to encounter Tsurita's powerfully innovative and provocative work, which resonates with meaning for manga historians and contemporary audiences alike."
—Pop Matters

"A long overdue and revelatory collection of masterfully crafted and deeply affecting stories."
—Library Journal

"Offering far more than a glimpse into Kuniko’s professional career, The Sky is Blue reflects on her satirical subversion of social and cultural ideals of femininity in an industry dominated by men."—ArtReview

"Gathered together in The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud, [the] stylistic differences across her oeuvre are now more discernible, affirming Tsurita’s role as pioneering comic artist (no gendered qualifier needed!). At last, her short career (she died at 35) can finally be recognized in mainstream comics."—Hyperallergic

From the Publisher

08/01/2020

A selection of comics completed by Tsurita—the only female cartoonist to appear regularly in the influential alternative manga magazine Garo before the late Seventies, arrives in English for the first time, featuring a smoothly rendered translation by Holmberg. The stories here, all completed between 1966 and 1980, offer a distinct perspective on the lives and attitudes of young people in Japan during the time, often with a cynical or satirical angle. In "65121320262719," a woman struggles to find her place in student protests and the counterculture only to be rebuffed, and in "Anti," a group of bohemians screen a film, in which a man falls into a volcano and dies. The humorous tone displayed in earlier work, such as "The Tragedy of Princess Rokunomiya," about a woman whose disaffectedness is mistaken for enlightenment by her peers, is replaced by a darker, more foreboding tone toward the end of the collection. This is especially evident in the titular story, which features a woman frolicking around a strangely empty landscape, wondering where all the people have gone, and culminates in a spread of a mushroom cloud rising from the horizon. VERDICT A long overdue and revelatory collection of masterfully crafted and deeply affecting stories.

Library Journal