career contributing to the kashibon rental comics market which flourished in the 1950s. This market targeted a working class audience looking for cheap entertainment, and the cartoonists who fed this market were usually working class themselves. The nihilistic stories, which Tsuge considers hackwork, were done in the gekiga style—dark, realistic comics with mature themes which first developed in Japan in the late 1950s and 1960s. Garo (1965–1970) Tsuge found himself debt-ridden, and would sell blood to raise money. When a girlfriend left him in his early 20s, Tsuge went into depression and attempted suicide. When he had heard about Tsuge's plight, Katsuichi Nagai printed "Yoshiharu Tsuge—please get in touch!" on one of the pages of monthly Garo, the avant-garde comics magazine Nagai had founded in 1964. In 1966, he published his autobiographical story "Chiko" ("Chiko, the Java sparrow"), depicting his daily life as a struggling manga artist living with a bar hostess making most of their money. It started the movement of Watakushi manga ("I manga", or "comics about me"), also represented by Yu Takita, Tadao Tsuge, and Shinichi Abe. The concept was a borrowed one from watakushi shosetsu (I-novel) tradition in Japanese literature. Tsuge began contributing to Garo in a style with cartoony figures and realistic backgrounds. The style was similar to other contributors to the magazine, such as Sanpei Shirato and Shigeru Mizuki. Tsuge's stories at the time, however, stood apart by tending towards surrealism and introspection. , Tsuge's most famous work, was published in Garo in 1967. Said to have come from a dream Tsuge had while taking a rooftop nap, the twenty-three page work follows a youth who first appears wading out of the ocean. An artery on his arm has been severed by a jellyfish, and he desperately hunts for a doctor. Laden with symbolic images of rural poverty, industry and the Pacific War, his journey takes him through a village on a train moving backwards, and he finally has his arm mended by a gynecologist who attaches a valve to his severed artery. The work spoke to the alienated 1960s youth, and made Tsuge's reputation as a cult personality. It has become one of the key examples of avant garde Japanese comics. In February 1968, Tsuge became involved with the avant-garde actress and children's book illustrator Maki Fujiwara. His success at Garo since 1965 meant he was no longer starved for cash, and he