Oba Electroplating Factory

Tsuge (Nejishiki) is at the top of his game in this dazzling collection from the 1970s, which finds the underground manga legend moving from nightmare surrealism to semi-autobiographical pieces that draw horror from unflinching realism. The title story is a highlight, set at a decaying factory where employees waste away from lung poisoning while processing shrapnel for American bombs. Tsuge mocks his own penchant for grimness in “Realism Inn,” in which he visits a run-down rural hotel for inspiration (“People will love it! I’ll ride this domestic tourism boom yet!”) but is upset to find it isn’t gritty in a picturesque way. “Yoshio’s Youth” follows a young artist as he finds work in the disreputable end of the manga industry and is taken under the wing of a fast-talking manga creator. By this point in his career, Tsuge had refined his off-kilter indie art into a clear and evocatively detailed style. His depictions of poor and working-class life have the force of lived experience, and his stories about the early manga industry evoke an intriguingly seedy world of con artists and fly-by-night operations. By turns bluntly honest and slyly self-referential, this is an essential work of alternative manga and 20th-century Japanese literature. (Aug.)