After Okimasa rips one of his works in progress, Hiroshi momentarily quits manga, but is encouraged after a letter from Ōshiro.

It facilitates this by putting Katsumi, Matsumoto, Takao Saito, and Kuroda in a "manga camp", an apartment in Tennōji-ku, Osaka.

Hinomaru also ventures into publishing gag panel manga from Tokyo artists, but this results in a large loss.

Back home, Katsumi experiences a burst of creativity and writes the manga he wanted to, titled Black Blizzard.

[1] The English version was translated by Taro Nettleton, and edited and designed by American cartoonist Adrian Tomine.

The book has been translated into French as Une Vie dans les marges ("A Life on the Margins") (Editions Cornelius, 2011), and into German as Gegen den Strom — Eine Autobiografie in Bildern ("Against the Current — an Autobiography in Pictures") (Carlsen Verlag, 2013).

he further comments "a book like A Drifting Life is fairly easy to pick apart on a drawing-by-drawing or line-by-line basis.

[18] Comics212's Christopher Butcher comments "At its heart A Drifting Life is a memoir, filled with a density of details to give it a setting and place that will be immediately familiar to Japanese readers of the last generation but that will largely evade North American ones.

This is not a bad thing, if anything the unfamiliarity of the time and place of this story will add to the experience of the lead drifting through his life, tied only to the comic that I hope you'll be holding in your hands".

At its heart, A Drifting Life is the simple story of a young man discovering his talent and by extension his place in the world.

While a lot of the secondary characters fall into Tatsumi's trap of coming out of the same mold as one another, overall I was pleased to see how much stronger the art in A Drifting Life was in comparison to his short story collections.

I also really have to give Tatsumi credit for how he draws Japan in the 1940s and 1950s; so much of the story comes to life in the way that he sketches the buildings and streets of Osaka and Tokyo.