Chiba Pref. – Tadao Tsuge was only 4 when World War II ended. Now 85, memories of that time are still quick to surface, no matter how peaceful the day.

“It was daytime. I came out of an air-raid shelter and looked up. A Zero fighter plane was flying while burning,” he tells The Japan Times. “That image has stayed with me all my life.”

Those memories would shape not only the manga artist’s childhood but the work that followed. One of the leading figures of the gritty movement known as gekiga (literally, “dramatic pictures”), Tsuge spent decades chronicling the lives of society’s outsiders, drawing on memories of war, hunger and postwar poverty to create stories grounded in everyday reality.