Tokyo These Days, Vol. 1

The winner of multiple Eisner Awards, author Taiyo Matsumoto explores the relationships between a manga editor, manga creators, art, and the rhythm of life these days.

After 30 years as a manga editor, Kazuo Shiozawa suddenly quits. Although he feels early retirement is the only way to atone for his failures as an editor, the manga world isn’t done with him. 

On his final day as an editor, Shiozawa takes a train he’s ridden hundreds of times to impart some last advice to a manga creator whose work he used to edit. Later, he is drawn to return to a bookshop at the request of a junior editor who wants his help dealing with an incorrigible manga creator who used to be edited by Shiozawa and now refuses to work with anyone else. For Shiozawa, Tokyo these days is full of memory and is cocooned in the inescapable bonds among manga creators, their editors, art, and life itself.

Taiyo Matsumoto is best known to English-reading audiences as the creator of the Eisner Award-winning Tekkonkinkreet, which in 2006 was made into an animated feature film of the same name directed by Michael Arias. In 2007, Matsumoto was awarded the Japan Media Arts Festival Excellence Award, and in 2020 he won his second Eisner Award for the English publication of Cats of the Louvre.