;"Hell" ;"Just a Man" ;"Sky burial ;"Rash" ;"Woman in the Mirror" ;"Night Falls Again" ;"Life is So Sad" ;"Click Click Click" ;"Good-bye"
Production and release
The stories in the manga were written between 1971 and 1972, as Tatsumi transitioned from rental comics to publishing in magazines. "Hell" was published in the Japanese Playboy, which surprised Tatsumi because publishers would not publish that kind of subject matter at the time. The stories were created without assistants. When he started writing for magazines, Tatsumi started to tackle social issues and the editors gave him complete creative freedom. Due to the political atmosphere at the time, Tatsumi felt disillusioned by Japan's fascination with its economic growth. "Hell" was inspired by a photograph Tatsumi saw of a shadow burnt into a wall by radiation heat of the nuclear bomb. Tatsumi also grew up in Osaka near a military base called Itami Airfield, which influenced his perception of American soldiers and their portrayal in "Good-Bye". Drawn and Quarterly published the manga in North America on June 1, 2008. It was edited and designed by Adrian Tomine. In an interview with Newsarama, Tomine described the process of creating the book as a collaborative one between the publisher, Tatsumi, and Tatsumi's representative. Tomine himself had to make panel-by-panel decisions on the translation of sound effects and whether a panel should be mirrored. For the design of the book, his goal was to "arrive at a design which is attractive and eye-catching, but also one in which the emphasis is placed squarely on Mr. Tatsumi's work."
Reception
Jeremy Estes of PopMatters called Tatsumi's imagination "dark and disturbing, but definitely worth the trip." Esters added that Tatsumi's utilitarian art style and clean style of storytelling make the manga easy to follow visually, but its tone of despair can be overwhelming. Bill Randall of The Comics Journal described the manga's stories "as subtle as pissing in someone's face", but acknowledged Tatsumi's place in manga history and the strength of his images. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly observed that Tatsumi tackles difficult subjects, but instead of exploiting, he humanizes his characters. It also called his art masterful in how he varies his style and depicts "graceful motion, grisly suffering and complicated emotion." Gordon Flagg of Booklist noted that the stories in the manga are more political than usual for Tatsumi in their portrayal of postwar Japan, saying of the manga: "Tatsumi's mastery of the visual simplicity of classic manga gives a stark power to these devastating, uncompromising pieces." Richard Rayner of the Los Angeles Times described the stories as "remarkable, amazing" saying that their style is "spare, elliptical and it's sometimes necessary to read two or three times to appreciate the full nightmarish power." Andrew Wheeler of ComicMix preferred the stories translated in Abandon the Old in Tokyo, but still found the stories "Hell" and the titular title to be comparable, calling the manga "a stunning achievement, a collection of dark, realistic stories from a side of the world we rarely see." Calling the manga bleak, Tom Baker of The Daily Yomiuri said that "there's no point in reading such depressing stuff unless it is done very well. And Tatsumi does it excellently." The manga was nominated for the 2009 Eisner Award for Best Archival Collection/Project—Comic Books.
