He Rolled Me Up Like a Grilled Squid

A manga icon’s most perplexing, transgressive, and astounding work of horrorand surrealism

By the mid-1970s, Tsuge Yoshiharu was a man changed by circumstance—something hiswork from 1975 to 1981 boldly reveals. After settling into married life with fellow artistFujiwara Maki (author of Eisner-winning My Picture Diary), Tsuge would return to thenarrative formulas that he knew best: tall tales exchanged between fellow travelers,macabre parables tinged with magical realism, and the enduring comedy of the domesticeveryday in a Japan rebuilding itself in the decades following the Second World War.

And yet the confusion and mental illness simmering beneath the surface of his moresurreal works come to a rolling boil, reaching an unsettling and horrific crescendo in aseries of nightmarish delusions. He Rolled Me Up Like A Grilled Squid captures a midcareerauthor taking stock of his anxieties and suspicions while connecting the dotsbetween his seemingly monotonous present and his complicated past. Confrontationsbetween both periods in his life are explored through the lens of his deteriorating mentalstate, expressed directly through experiments with different visual styles collected in thisvolume.

Translated by prolific art and comics historian Ryan Holmberg, He Rolled Me Up Like AGrilled Squid is a veteranstoryteller’s most compelling observations about people at their most human.