The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud - Paperback

by Kuniko Tsurita (Author), Ryan Holmberg (Translator)

The work of a visionary and iconoclastic feminist cartoonist--available in English for the first time

The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud collects the best short stories from Kuniko Tsurita's remarkable career. While the works of her male peers in literary manga are widely reprinted, this formally ambitious and poetic female voice is like none other currently available to an English readership. A master of the comics form, expert pacing and compositions combined with bold characters are signature qualities of Tsurita's work.

Author Biography

Kuniko Tsurita was born in 1947 in Japan. In 1965, at age eighteen, while still in high school, she debuted in the legendary alt-manga monthly Garo, where she was the magazine's first and only regular female contributor until the late 1970s. Tsurita's early work reflects her interest in bohemian youth culture, while her later work became more surreal and dystopian, with influences ranging from modern French literature to the manga of her peers in Garo, including Yoshiharu Tsuge, Seiichi Hayashi, and Shigeru Mizuki, for whom she worked as an assistant for a short time in the late '60s. In 1973, Tsurita was diagnosed with lupus, at which point specters of death began to heavily shadow her work. She died in 1985 at age thirty-seven.