Life

Lars Martinson was born in 1977 in Minnesota

Minnesota

Minnesota is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States. The twelfth largest state of the U.S., it is the twenty-first most populous, with 5.3 million residents. Minnesota was carved out of the eastern half of the Minnesota Territory and admitted to the Union as the thirty-second state...

. From 2003 to 2006, he lived and worked in Japan as an assistant English teacher with the JET Program. In 2007 he received a Xeric Grant for Comic Book Self-Publishers that allowed him to work on his graphic novel Tōnoharu. He went back to Japan in 2008 to study East Asian Calligraphy with a two-year research scholarship from the Japanese Government. He returned again to Japan in July 2011 to work with the JET Program.

Work

Tōnoharu is the story of Dan Wells, an American assistant English teacher in rural Japan. It is inspired by Martinson's experience. It is a self-deprecatory, tender and humorous description of the daily life of an isolated dull unimaginitive foreigner in a country whose language he does not master.

Books

• Young Men of a certain Mind, selfpublished, 2003
• Tōnoharu, Part One, Pliant Press, 2008
• Tōnoharu, Part Two, Pliant Press, 2010
• Tonoharu (french translation of both volumes), Le lézard noir, 2011