Fallen Words is the seventy-five year old Tatsumi's follow up work to his epic memoir, A Drifting Life. Taking its title from the centuries-old tradition of rakugo, an interpretive and performative type of storytelling that has been handed down over many generations in Japan, with each performer providing his (or her?) own spin on the story through their respective manners of performance, Fallen Words offers a look at an art form that is a comics kin to the interpretive preformative tradition of jazz here in the USA, where each performer can put their own stamp on a tune, whether it is a timeless classic or a passing pop song.