Reddit reviews A Drifting Life

Elie Weisel's Night is an astonishing look at the horrors of World War II.

Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running covers mostly the ins and outs, mundane to nontrivial aspects of his writing career.

If you're interested in a graphic novel type of autobiography, there are two that are excellent:
Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Yoshihiro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life. The former is Satrapi's account of a young girl growing up in Iran and the latter is Tatsumi's perspective on post-war Japan. Both are very good.

Is it this? http://www.amazon.com/A-Drifting-Life-Yoshihiro-Tatsumi/dp/1897299745

I was gonna say Frederik L. Schodt's: Manga! Manga! but you beat me too it. (although as all_my_fish said it might be a bit hard to find it.)

Manga: 60 Years of Japanese Comics and Dreamland Japan aren't too shabby in terms of information on manga (although again you will have to find them first.)

Also A Drifting Life by Yoshihiro Tatsumi is an autobiographic manga about the gekiga movement that took place withing manga (and talks about the history of manga to a certain extent. (It is also a pretty well done manga in and of itself)).

I wish I could help find you some better non-book sources.

Your essay seems ok so far.

Here is a couple of lines from Schodt's book that you might could use:

>The word manga (pronounced "mahngah") can mean caricature, cartoon, comic strip, comic book, or animation. Coined by the Japanese woodblock- print artist Hokusai in 1814, it uses the Chinese ideograms [I don't know how to type these sorry] man ("involuntary" or "in spite of oneself") and [another one chinese character] ga ("picture"). Hokusai was evidently trying to describe something like "whimsical sketches." But it is interesting to note that the first ideogram has a secondary meaning of "morally corrupt." The term manga did not come into popular usage until the beginning of this century. Before that, cartoons were called Toba-e or "Toba pictures," after an 11th-century artist; giga, or "playful pictures"; kyoga, or "crazy pictures"; and, in the late 19th century, ponchi-e, or "Punch pictures," after the British magizine. In addition to manga one also hears today the word gekiga or "drama pictures" to describe the more serious, realistic story-comics. Some Japanese, however, simply adopt an English word to describe their favorite reading matter: komikkusu.

(from page 18 of Manga! Manga!)

there you go a source you can use and quote and make your teacher happy (maybe).