This is the other Yoshiharu Tsuge story collection I had sitting around for a long time, after the ねじ式 revised edition I finished last week. Compared to that, this one is less organized, and less definitive/scholarly feeling, but it is still a nice edition. This one focuses on the weirder stories from the author, and fortunately (as I don’t think I would have been keyed into this when I bought them) there’s only one or two stories that overlap. The collection feels quite divided between later work and earlier work, with the former placed earlier in the volume for whatever reason. This later work reminds me the most of what I’ve been reading in AX, and has actively dreamlike and unconventional atmospheres, and sometimes repulses with, for example, use of rape in the stories, and heavy use of the technique I saw some in the ねじ式 volume where Tsuge depicts particularly nude women’s bodies in relatively posed, photorealistic situations (minus censored genitals). There is still somehow I think a charm to his work here in this period, and it’s especially interesting to me to see how directly it feels like it maps onto strains of work I still see in AX… but I dunno, it’s also very much not my favorite. The earlier works here are from as early as 1959 and feel right out of the 貸本マンガ era, and lately I’ve more and more been feeling like this period is up my alley, with these as no exception. Like for one example off the top of my head there’s a relatively tame but still fun time travel story. I think for me personally – I’m not really that interested ultimately in pushing the outermost boundary of creativity (especially when that’s in danger of just coming across as “edgy”)… and if you can wed a pulpy-ass genre story with interesting ideas and themes that’s what I’m most on board for. And so I get a real kick out of these earlier works. Especially interesting since the only other Tsuge collection I’ve read was a very concentrated slice of what comes across here as a sort of middle period. So – still a neat collection, and interesting! But tough to compete in comparison with the more contextualized other volume of his work I read. And I would say of Yoshiharu Tsuge from these that I’m consistently at least interested in his work but not necessarily always fully taken with it.