Talk to my Back

I stumbled upon this manga by pure chance, and I was deligthed to see it was serialized in Garo, which is the magazine that published a good number of my favourite manga and hosted (is that a proper term?) artists which I find really interesting. If only more stuff from Garo was translated! That said when reading the afterword of this manga, which included the mangakas biography, I was surprised to learn that women barely participated in the alternative manga scene, with only a quarter of contributors being female. At this point in time (60's to late 70's), women were actually becoming pretty popular in the industry, but as Ryan Holmberg stated (the author of the biography) Garo was mostly made to serve mens angsty, psycho-sexual fantasies. Anyway, in the 80's and 90's this changed and Garo welcomed more than a couple of really great female artists, in fact one of the most popular manga that was published in Garo (in the west at least), Nekojiru Udon, was made by a woman. Anyway, this is where Murasaki Yamada comes into play, the author of Talk to my Back. She's been a part of Garo for a long time, publishing consistently from 1979 to 1986, and she even ended up very involved with the staff, befriending many of them and marrying the editor, yet her work didn't really quite "fit" the Garo style. Her work was mostly tied to feminism, motherhood and family life from the perspective of a woman that is an artist - but also a wife and a mother. Her art lacked the typical shojo style (she was completely aligned age-wise with the Year 24 Group, which should put things into perspective) and because of that it feels like she never got the credit she deserved and she remains overlooked to this day. However, publishing in Garo seems to have given her the total freedom she needed to address the difficulty of living as a housewife in Japan during the 70's.

This manga really made an impression on me. And holy shit, this mangaka was something else. I truly enjoyed reading the whole 30 page biography, and I think I'm going to include it in my articles eventually because I instantly fell in love with Yamada's character and her life's work. Honestly I am stunned that none of it almost made it out of Japan.

Ok ok, enough about the mangaka, what about the manga??? This is a 36 chapter manga, with the chapters being around 10-ish pages long max. The main character is a woman who deals with her life of being a stay at home mom, underappreciated wife, part-time worker with a short expiration date, and someone who decided to make money from her passions. The chapters are full of deep introspection and comical musings, they speak about a woman that loves being a mother but hates being seen as a slave and a volunteer. So many chapters made me think of my mother and how amazing of a job she did, I even shed tears during a number of chapters because of how close they hit. Such a coincidence I recently read Kim Jiyoung, born 1982, because these two works deal with very similar topics. I feel like many women struggle with losing themselves as they become wives and mothers, and this manga might help with such feelings. Yamada herself, while being critical of such women, wished they'd read her manga and shared her pain and anger with them.

I enjoyed the minimalist and simple artstyle a lot, it has a certain evergreen quality to it that makes it indistinguishable from similar art being made today. I mean, even the subject matter is still very relevant, and unlike many feminist inspired? manga I have read, this manga just doesn't shy away from it, the main character complains about issues that are still issues today and nothing is being approached in a touchy, delicate manner. I'm making this sound like some kind of an extremist work full of passion and angry monologues, but it's really not. It's not even preachy, or forced. It just comes across as very raw to me.