The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge review – powerfully strange

Whichever way you look at it, the publication of The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge is a big deal. Tsuge, who was born in Tokyo in 1937 and made his mark in the 60s working for Garo magazine, is a hugely influential cartoonist: the first manga-ka to put his characters’ interior lives fully at the heart of his stories, strips that he also used to revisit Japan’s native customs in the face of the rush to westernisation that followed the second world war. But though his name is widely revered in the comics world – in February, he received a lifetime achievement award at the Angoulême festival in France, which also staged a major retrospective of his work – many of his cartoons have never been translated into English. The Swamp, which gathers together 11 stories from the mid-60s, is the first volume in a series of seven by Tsuge that Drawn & Quarterly plans to publish in the coming years.

What are they like, these early tales? I found them powerfully strange: here was a world I had not encountered before, and it took a little getting used to. The Japan they depict is still highly traditional, with all the visual pleasure this suggests: Tsuge’s drawings, though hardly beautiful, are intensely expressive. But the keeping up of social appearances involved in everyday life only makes the desperate poverty suffered by his characters harder to bear. In Destiny, a young samurai and his wife are so hard up, they agree a suicide pact. In Chirpy, a broke cartoonist and his hostess girlfriend must make do with a pet java sparrow rather than a child. In The Phoney Warrior, another struggling samurai pretends to be a famous warrior, to con people out of their cash with displays of his swordsmanship.

A page from The Swamp. Photograph: Yoshiharu Tsuge

Some of the stories are only vignettes, so brief they end almost before they begin. But others are more substantial, their deeper meanings connecting both to ideas of creativity and what it means to make art, and to the sexual subconscious. In the title story, a young woman tells a stranger she meets in the woods that her pet snake tries to strangle her while she sleeps, something that makes her feel so good she could “die”. In The Ninjess, the title character finally gets her bloody revenge on the violent ruler of a fiefdom in the old province of Mino, a man who has been keeping her captive for many years. (Tsuge’s women, though not obviously powerful, are in possession of vast inner resources, chief among them a certain resilience.)

The essay by the longstanding manga editor, Mitsuhiro Asakawa, to be found at the end of the book, may not answer every one of the questions you’re likely to have about these stories (though this is how it should be, given that their highly ambivalent endings are at least half of the reason for their uncommon force). But its inclusion is a shrewd move on the part of D&Q. Not only does it put Tsuge’s career and legacy succinctly in context; it stirs in the attentive reader an even greater eagerness for volume two.

• The Swamp by Yoshiharu Tsuge is published by Drawn & Quarterly (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15