Boat Life  returns in Volume 2, with novelist Tsuda Kenta continuing to meander between home life, the family jeans shop, and days of solitude on the river. Among this graphic novel's colorful cast of friends, we meet a former manga artist who dives for curiously-shaped stones and sells them from a riverside hut, and an eager producer intent on a film adaptation of one of Tsuda’s novels. Unfortunately, Tsuda’s health is deteriorating. He learns from the doctor that his liver was damaged by working at a blood bank when he was young. But Kenta continues his dream boat life, while obsessed by an enormous fish. Don’t miss the raucous night of Tsuda and his buddies boozing at a local temple. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more honest account in comics of how Japanese felt about life during and after World War II.  While fans of  Trash Market  and  Slum Wolf  will enjoy this late-career elaboration of après-guerre themes Tsuge has been exploring since his debut in the legendary alt-manga magazine Garo in the late 1960s, fans of his brother Tsuge Yoshiharu’s   The Man Without Talent  will appreciate the more relaxed and optimistic take on middle-aged reclusion and the grind of work and family.  " Tsuge is one of the pioneers of  gekiga  manga for adult readers." – Publisher's Weekly Tsuge Tadao is one of alternative manga’s cult stars. Debuting as a cartoonist in the rental kashihon market in 1959, he was a leading contributor to the legendary magazine  Garo  during its heyday in the late 1960s and ’70s. He has drawn extensively for magazines like  Yagyo ,  Comic Baku , and  Gento , often pulling from his experiences growing up in the slums of Tokyo, working for ooze-for-booze blood banks, and daydreaming while fishing. He currently lives in Chiba Prefecture, north of Tokyo, where he splits his time between cooking for his family and drawing ever-stranger manga. His work has been translated into English, Spanish, and Italian.