Between 1975 and 1981, the life of manga creator Yoshiharu Tsuge was transformed by a period of domestic stability following his marriage to fellow artist Fujiwara Maki. This era, set against the backdrop of a postwar Japan still in the process of rebuilding, became the crucible for a body of work that channeled his most profound personal turmoil. The stories collected from this time revisit the narrative forms he knew best: the tall tales shared among travelers, macabre parables tinged with magical realism, and the quiet comedy of everyday domestic life.

Beneath the surface of these familiar formulas, however, something far more disturbing began to emerge. The confusion and mental illness that had long lingered beneath his more surreal creations reached a rolling boil, erupting into a series of nightmarish delusions that form the core of this volume. The central conflict is an internal one, as Tsuge takes stock of his mounting anxieties and suspicions, forcibly connecting the dots between his seemingly monotonous present and his complicated, often traumatic past.

These confrontations between different periods of his life are explored entirely through the lens of his deteriorating mental state. The narrative arc follows not a traditional plot, but a descent into the horror of the psyche, expressed through drastic experiments with visual styles. What emerges is a compelling, unsettling catalog of creative exploration, where the author offers his most raw observations about people at their most human, capturing the essence of a veteran storyteller wrestling with his own mind.