Is The Push Man and Other Stories Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read
Quick Answer
Worth reading if you want gekiga's bleakest, most unfiltered register and can handle genuinely difficult subject matter — this is not an easy or casual recommendation, and some of its content and attitudes toward women have aged into real sticking points.
Quick Verdict
“Historically important and formally striking, but also legitimately hard to recommend without real caveats about its repetitive, often misogynistic content.”
Best for: Readers already interested in gekiga history who want Tatsumi at his bleakest and most formally controlled, with full awareness of what the stories actually contain.
Not for: Readers sensitive to sexual violence or looking for a representative introduction to manga as a medium — this is a specific, difficult outlier, not a starting point.
- Type
- Manga
- Genres
- Drama, Thriller
- Status
- Completed
- Author
- Yoshihiro Tatsumi
- Publisher
- Gekiga Young / self-published dōjinshi
- Platform
- Drawn & Quarterly
| Quick facts | |
|---|---|
| Format | Manga (seinen) |
| Run | completed |
| Content | Sexual violence including rape and sex slavery, prostitution, suicide, infant death and abortion imagery, strangulation and other graphic violence |
Overview
Sixteen short stories, most just a handful of pages, make up this 1969 collection from Yoshihiro Tatsumi — originally serialized in Gekiga Young, a pulp magazine aimed at young men, and in self-published dōjinshi. The title story follows a Tokyo subway worker whose job is physically shoving commuters into overcrowded train cars; others follow men ground down by failing marriages, dead-end jobs, and their own bodies. Adrian Tomine edited and designed the English collection for Drawn & Quarterly.
This isn't the introspective, autobiographical Tatsumi of A Drifting Life. It's gekiga in its rawest early form — unfiltered, sexually explicit by the standards of its original pulp home, and built almost entirely around men at the end of their rope.
What it does well
The formal control is real. Compressing a complete, specific character study into a handful of pages sixteen times over without most of them feeling thin is a genuine technical achievement, and the title story in particular turns a strange, mundane job into an effective metaphor for a whole life being crushed by increments.
The collection also matters historically. This is gekiga before it got cleaned up for a wider or more international audience — pulpy, cheap, and aimed at a specific erotic-pulp readership — and reading it gives you a more complete, less flattering picture of where the style actually came from than the more polished work that followed.
Drawn & Quarterly's presentation treats the material with real seriousness rather than either sanitizing or sensationalizing it, and the book's award nominations and critical attention weren't undeserved — there's a reason it became one of the more talked-about manga releases of its year in English.
Where it falls short
The content is heavy, and it recurs. Sexual violence, coerced sex work, and dead-infant imagery don't appear once for impact — they show up across multiple stories, and taken together the effect reads less like deliberate thematic repetition and more like a limited well the collection keeps returning to.
The most serious and most frequently raised criticism is how the book treats women: as victims, temptations, or obstacles almost without exception, rarely as characters with their own interior life. That's not a minority reading of the collection — it's one of the most consistent critical responses to it, and reading all sixteen stories back to back makes the pattern hard to miss or excuse.
The protagonists themselves also blur together. Nearly every story centers a passive man things happen to rather than one who drives his own story, and across sixteen stories that sameness starts to numb rather than accumulate.
Verdict
The Push Man and Other Stories is a real piece of gekiga history and a genuine technical achievement in short-form cartooning, and it's also a legitimately difficult, repetitive, and at times misogynistic read that deserves those caveats stated plainly rather than buried. Go in knowing exactly what you're getting, and this earns its reputation; go in expecting an easy or representative Tatsumi starting point, and it won't deliver that.
Strengths & Weaknesses
Strengths
- Tatsumi's command of short-form storytelling is genuinely impressive — sixteen stories, most just a handful of pages, each landing a complete, specific portrait of working-class alienation rather than feeling like a fragment.
- The title story and several others build a real sense of dread through mundane, repetitive labor — the push man's job of physically shoving commuters into train cars becomes a disturbingly effective metaphor for his whole life.
- It's a significant historical document of gekiga at its rawest, originally run in an erotic pulp magazine in 1969 rather than a prestige format, which gives the stories an unfiltered, unsanitized quality you don't get from Tatsumi's later, more curated work.
- Drawn & Quarterly's edition, edited and designed by Adrian Tomine, treats the material seriously without dressing it up — it was nominated for the Ignatz and Harvey Awards and landed on major year-end comics lists for a reason.
Weaknesses
- The content is genuinely heavy and recurring in ways that compound across sixteen stories: sexual violence, coerced sex work, and dead-infant imagery show up repeatedly rather than appearing once for effect, which several critics have flagged as excessive rather than purposeful.
- A real and fair critical complaint is misogyny — women in these stories are overwhelmingly victims, temptations, or obstacles, with little interiority of their own, and reading the collection straight through makes that pattern hard to ignore.
- The protagonists are almost uniformly passive, put-upon men the world happens to rather than characters who act, which gives the book a numbing sameness by the back half of the collection.
Similar Titles
an earlier, pulpier Tatsumi work for readers who want his crime-thriller side before this later, bleaker register.
the same artist's sprawling memoir, useful context for understanding the career and era this collection came out of.
a different, equally unflinching look at a man ground down by forces outside his control, in a more plot-driven package.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this a good introduction to Tatsumi or to gekiga in general?
Not really — it's a specific, difficult outlier even within his own body of work. A Drifting Life or Black Blizzard are gentler entry points; come to this one once you already know you want Tatsumi at his bleakest.
Are the stories connected?
No. All sixteen are standalone, though they share recurring themes of economic desperation, sexual frustration, and working-class Tokyo settings.
Is the misogyny criticism fair?
It's a widely shared critical view, not a fringe take — women in these stories are consistently written as victims or obstacles with little interiority, and that pattern is one of the collection's most-discussed weaknesses.
