Susumu Katsumata was a manga artist who began publishing in the 70s, and belongs to the second generation of authors who started their career in the legendary Garo magazine. His short stories were much appreciated by colleagues such as Yoshiharu Tsuge (L'homme sans talent), Hinako Sugiura (Oreillers de Laque) or Shigeru Mizuki (NonNonBa, Gegege no Kitaro), but never became a mainstream success, which led him to slow down his production in the 80s, branching into book illustration and other activities. In a sad twist of fate, this collections of short stories, originally published in Japan in 2005, earned him success and critical acclaim, as well as the Japan Cartoonist Association Award, but he was terminally ill and did not live long to enjoy the belated recognition of his talent. Since then, this book has also been published in Korea, France and, of course, the US & Canada by Drawn & Quarterly.What you'll get inside are ten splendid short stories, set in a rural, pre-modern Japan of hard, snow-covered winters, where the natural and the supernatural, such as ghosts or kappa creatures, can still sometimes mingle together, although, whenever they appear in the book, these beings are on the retreat, the remains of a vanishing past. The protagonists are toiling peasants, travelling monks, sake brewers, and lots of boys and girls facing the adult world at the terrible age of 12-13.Let's take a look at some of the tales. We have, for instance, "Torajiro Kappa", in which a kappa is persuaded by a young kid to interfere in a case of a husband that beats his wife whenever he's drunk. In "Wild Geese Memorial Service" a young man who gets lost in a snowstorm is rescued by a local farmer, and is found to bear an uncanny resemblance to his (very attractive and widowed) daughter's late husband. In "Mulberries" a boy and a girl share the pains of puberty, their attraction to each other disguised as childish pigtail-pulling hostility. A traveling monk has a rather explicit dream involving "The Dream Spirit" after having too much sake and sleeping in too crowded common rooms at the local inn. The girl that works scrubbing the floors at the inn at the hot springs in "Cricket Hill", is getting old enough to hear suggestions about getting more involved in entertaining the male clientèle of the establishment.The drawing style is simple (these guys didn't have an army of assistants to do their bidding) yet beautiful and evocative. The first page of "Specter" is a lyrical 3-1-3 panel evocation of the arrival of spring, when blind traveling musicians came to bring a little entertainment to the people in the villages. Although "Now, it was just old Otora who'd come by the hot springs alone".At the end of the book, we find an interview with the author, that appeared originally in the Japanese edition of Red Snow, and a short essay about his life and career, first published in a Korean manga magazine (that's where my "knowledge" about the life and work of the author comes from, by the way :p). The typography work is excellent, as we've come to expect from D&Q (nothing like the arial or comic sans horrors of French publishers.) Sadly, the paper is nowhere as good and heavy as in the compilations of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's short stories, and this is the only fault i can find in this wonderful book.