Talk To My Back

A celebrated masterwork shimmering with vulnerability from one of altmangas most important female artists. “Now that we’ve woken from the dream what are we going to do” Chiharu thinks to herself rubbing her husband’s head affectionately. Set in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Tokyo Murasaki Yamadas Talk to My Back 1981–84 explores the fraying of Japans suburban middleclass dreams through a womans relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence and with her husband who works late and sees his wife as little more than a domestic servant. While engaging frankly with the compromises of marriage and motherhood Yamada remains generous with the characters who fetter her protagonist. When her husband has an affair Chiharu feels that she too has broken the marital contract by straying from the template of the happy housewife. Yamada saves her harshest criticisms for society at large particularly its false promises of eternal satisfaction within the nuclear family—as fears of having been thrown away inside that empty vessel called the household gnaw at Chiharu’s soul. Yamada was the first cartoonist in Japan to use the expressive freedoms of altmanga to address domesticity and womanhood in a realistic critical and sustained way. A watershed work of literary manga Talk to My Back was serialized in the influential magazine Garo in the early 1980s and is translated by Eisnernominated Ryan Holmberg.