Tsuge was born on 30 October 1937 in
Katsushika,
Tokyo, Japan. He was the eldest of three sons. After the death of Tsuge's father in 1942, two half-sisters, from his mother's second marriage, were introduced to his family. The recession in post-
World War II Japan, inspired Tsuge to create comics to the pay-libraries' editors in an attempt to solve his financial problems. Being intensely shy, making dramatic pictures was one way to avoid meeting people and to earn money simultaneously. He created his first
gekiga at 18, showing
Osamu Tezuka's influence, who was one of the first mainstream artists to draw
gekiga.
Early career (1955–1965) Tsuge began his cartooning career contributing to the
kashibon rental comics market which flourished in the 1950s. This market targeted a working class audience looking for cheap entertainment, and the cartoonists who fed this market were usually working class themselves. The nihilistic stories, which Tsuge considers hackwork, were done in the
gekiga style—dark, realistic comics with mature themes which first developed in Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Garo (1965–1970) Tsuge found himself debt-ridden, and would sell blood to raise money. When a girlfriend left him in his early 20s, Tsuge went into depression and attempted suicide. When he had heard about Tsuge's plight,
Katsuichi Nagai printed "Yoshiharu Tsuge—please get in touch!" on one of the pages of monthly
Garo, the avant-garde comics magazine Nagai had founded in 1964. In 1966, he published his
autobiographical story "Chiko" ("Chiko, the Java sparrow"), depicting his daily life as a struggling manga artist living with a bar hostess making most of their money. It started the movement of
Watakushi manga ("I manga", or "comics about me"), also represented by Yu Takita, Tadao Tsuge, and Shinichi Abe. The concept was a borrowed one from
watakushi shosetsu (
I-novel) tradition in Japanese literature. Tsuge began contributing to
Garo in a style with cartoony figures and realistic backgrounds. The style was similar to other contributors to the magazine, such as
Sanpei Shirato and
Shigeru Mizuki. Tsuge's stories at the time, however, stood apart by tending towards surrealism and introspection. , Tsuge's most famous work, was published in Garo in 1967. Said to have come from a dream Tsuge had while taking a rooftop nap, the twenty-three page work follows a youth who first appears wading out of the ocean. An artery on his arm has been severed by a jellyfish, and he desperately hunts for a doctor. Laden with symbolic images of rural poverty, industry and the Pacific War, his journey takes him through a village on a train moving backwards, and he finally has his arm mended by a gynecologist who attaches a valve to his severed artery. The work spoke to the alienated 1960s youth, and made Tsuge's reputation as a cult personality. It has become one of the key examples of avant garde Japanese comics. In February 1968, Tsuge became involved with the avant-garde actress and children's book illustrator . His success at Garo since 1965 meant he was no longer starved for cash, and he claims this made him lazy. After "
Mokkiriya no Shōjo" appeared in
Garos August issue that year, no more Tsuge stories appeared until "
Yanagiya Shujin" was printed in the February/March issue of
Garo in 1970. This was the last of the twenty-two stories that Tsuge contributed to
Garo.
Post-Garo (1970–1987) Tsuge did not have another story published until 1972. His stories from this point on broke with his
Garo style, and tended to be
autobiographical or erotic fantasies. Tsuge and Fujiwara were married in 1975, the same year their son was born. Tsuge was one of a number of cartoonists who found themselves unable to cope with the changes in the industry in the 1970s. The relatively free atmosphere of the 1950s and 1960s transitioned to one in which editors played a larger role, and schedules went from monthly to weekly.
Retirement and later life Suffering physically and psychologically, Tsuge ceased making comics after 1987. His last published work of comics was in June 1987, in which the main character attempts suicide after a relationship breaks up. Tsuge withdrew into a private life with his family, where they lived by the
Tama River in Tokyo. Tsuge lived with his son since his wife's 1999 death from cancer. While he has produced no new works, he cooperated with the filming and reprinting of his works.
Personal life and death His birth name is spelled , but he signed his works , with identical pronunciation. Tsuge's brother is also a cartoonist (author of
Trash Market and of
Slum Wolf, the latter published by the New York Review of Books in 2018). Tsuge died of aspiration pneumonia in Tokyo, on 3 March 2026, at the age of 88. ==Works==