Is The Man Without Talent Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Sukezo Sukegawa used to draw manga. He's decided he's no good at it, so he's quit — and that's the last conventional career move he makes. What follows is a string of schemes to support his wife and infant son without going back to the thing he's sworn off: selling used cameras to indifferent customers, ferrying a handful of passengers across a river on a barely-used boat, and finally settling into his strangest venture yet, collecting and selling suiseki, the ornamental viewing stones hobbyists prize for their shape. He is bad at all of it, in roughly the same quiet, resigned way each time.

This is Yoshiharu Tsuge's late-career, semi-autobiographical work, first serialized in the late 1980s and now available in English for the first time via New York Review Comics, translated and annotated by Ryan Holmberg. It's not plot-driven manga in any conventional sense. It's closer to a Japanese I-novel in comic form: episodic, interior, built around failure as a fixed state rather than an obstacle to overcome.

What it does well

The artwork is the reason to pick this up even if the premise sounds thin on paper. Tsuge draws riverbanks, train platforms, and cluttered rooms with a density and shadow that make the book's empty, directionless stretches genuinely absorbing to look at. His figures are plain and his compositions patient — panels sit and let you look rather than rushing you to the next beat.

What's more impressive is how much Tsuge gets across without dialogue doing the work. Sukezo's mustache hides his mouth for most of the book, a small visual choice that reads as a kind of enforced voicelessness; sweat beads on his face do more to communicate shame than any line of narration could. It's a book that trusts you to read faces and backgrounds instead of explaining itself, and that restraint pays off especially in the final chapter, which widens out into Japanese history, haiku, and Buddhist ideas about uselessness and stillness. It reframes everything that came before without turning preachy, and it's the strongest stretch in the book.

Where it falls short

There's no getting around it: nothing happens here in the way genre readers expect something to happen. Sukezo fails, fails again, and fails a third way, and the book's whole design depends on that repetition rather than escalation. Readers who need forward momentum to stay engaged will likely find the middle stretch a slog, however good it looks.

The supporting cast gets even less interiority than Sukezo does. His wife exists almost entirely as a vehicle for disgust and disappointment, and while that's arguably the point — this is a book about a man who has made himself impossible to live with — it leaves half the household a blank. And the final chapter's deep dive into Japanese literary and religious history, while the book's best material, assumes a cultural fluency a lot of English-language readers simply won't have without Holmberg's essay to lean on.

Verdict

The Man Without Talent isn't trying to entertain you in any usual sense, and it won't work for readers who need plot to stay interested. But as a piece of comics craft — as a portrait of failure drawn with this much patience and visual intelligence — it's genuinely singular. A short, strange, rewarding read for anyone curious about what manga looks like outside the genre machine.