Talk To My Back by Muraski Yamada (An Oxford College Student Review!)

Talk To My Back by Muraski Yamada

In this column, I feature comic book reviews written by my students at Oxford College of Emory University. Oxford College is a small liberal arts school just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. I challenge students to read and interpret comics because I believe sequential art and visual literacy are essential parts of education at any level (see my Manifesto!). I post the best of my students’ reviews in this column. Today, I am proud to present a review by Ritisha Lingampally:

Ritisha Lingampally is a first-year student at Oxford College and is considering majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. Her home is Hyderabad, India, and she currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Ritisha’s favorite writers include Oscar Wilde and favorite book is A Little Life. Her other interests include dancing on the Oxford and Emory dance teams, playing badminton, and completing jigsaw puzzles.

With subdued monochromatic art, Murasaki Yamada brings to life Talk To My Back, an alternative manga published in the early 1980s (1981-1984) on the heels of Japan’s radical feminist movement in the 1960s-1970s. Preceded by her successful publications in Garo (magazine) like Oh the Ways of the World and Sassy Cats, Yamada gradually developed a series of short poetic comics about domesticity, motherhood, and the small comforts, culminating in her masterwork, Talk To My Back. We see that this manga serves as a vivid canvas for her personal experiences, with elements of her daily life seamlessly woven into the naturalistic drawings and evocative dialogue during the characters’ conversations. So, what might you expect when you start reading?

The story follows Chiharu, a stay-at-home wife and a mother of two daughters, across deftly filled shots of her days in solitude, finding self-worth, and eventual independence. The bulk of the story lies within the unspoken words and silent frustrations that she faces, incognizant of everyone. Each chapter is a glimpse of the regular life she has, which seems mundane whether it’s a quiet trip she takes alone or the rhythmic routine of afternoon housework. However, each beautifully crafted scene is significant to the characters’ personalities, specifically in molding the identity of Chiharu and the slow realization of her personal agency. After an eleven-panel opening sequence, in which the story titled “Lonely Cinderella,” sets the scene with its hues of blue stencil drawings, the story presents Chiharu’s life, where monotony reigns once her children leave for school. Some days are just lonely, stretching endlessly, filled with reflections upon the loneliness she experiences. The character makes her way through the fraying of Japan’s middle-class dreams, as she tries to find herself outside of what it means to be a mother. Any grandiose dreams she has kept are tucked away, or wait, are there any that she can even recall?

In the shadow of an absent husband who takes her contributions for granted, Chiharu navigates the invisible labor that often goes unnoticed, as she is expected to fulfill every need of his own at his convenience. Through short stories, Yamada explores the relationship between Chiharu and her two daughters as she watches them mature while developing her own wings of identity outside of her given role. Now, there’s no set antagonist to the story, no spooky villain ready to crush the souls of humans. Rather, the “villain” of the story is masked beneath the systems of patriarchy and expectations placed upon her. Her husband’s emotional absence increasingly becomes clear as the children mature; he’s not present enough to celebrate the joys of parenting in seeing them grow up and letting them go. The audience also watches these family dynamics, where a man can do as he pleases, whereas the woman has to stay tending to the needs of others. Chiharu’s fear of being dumped in this vessel called family proves true, as more than acting as a mother or a wife, she’s become a domestic servant, “sold” from her family to his and one whose health is regarded in terms of the convenience of her husband. Although he might not be outwardly abusive, he’s just absent . . . not really there and that’s what makes the manga so devastating. It’s an interesting literary choice to make: after all, Yamada could have easily made Chiharu’s husband a major antagonist, but making an aloof husband so absent evoked the same, if not stronger, emotions than might have been created through an abusive one. The husband’s passivity traps Chiharu into isolation: not being recognized for her work, she receives little to no respect, and although they are in a relationship, he knows nothing about her. Yamada implements snippets of his character, with some seemingly positive scenes, but overall, represents what a “normal” man looks like during Chiharu’s time (the 1980s). Contrastingly, the women are tethered to their homes, flesh and bone attached to this safety net of “family,” and they are completely restricted from their potential, supporting the theme that complicity can still contribute to structural inequality, just not in the most overt ways one might expect.

On top of the theme of domestic life and its complexities, Yamada mainly criticized the glorification of a monogamous, gender-imbalanced, nuclear family that was commonly present during the 1980s. It was beyond feeling neglectful; it was about being free, and this unfulfilled happiness that was promised with the role. Many of these “professional housewives”, or sengyou shufu, are the epitome of femininity and are given to women despite their desires. Describing a demanding job suited to mold for the hegemonic structure that was the “salaryman,” Talk to My Back speaks for those women who previously had never been heard from before. A lot of what Chiharu feels is a result of cutting around the corners of her identity, becoming this almost free-form shape made to materialize. Her entire existence becomes a reflection of her children’s needs as if she is an extension of their lives. It’s even physical: her whole body serves her children like grasping onto their hands on a moving train or walking to the pace of one. This loss of identity spirals across several chapters, but the one that hit me the most is her realization that she did belong to herself. As she watches her children grow up in front of her eyes, she is struck by the small ways they echo her, but also in a way she’s lost herself. Breaking out of that intergeneration identity and structure is what ignites the desire to reclaim her identity and challenge the constraints of conventional life.

For me, what makes Talk To My Back so enthralling is that the art mirrors the narrative, completely still at times, quiet, and minimalist. In some panels, Chiharu is drawn with little to no outline, highlighting the erasure and disconnect from her whole life. Many of the backgrounds have plain walls, little patterns, or furniture, and much of the space is occupied but empty. A panel has its structured borders, but due to the use of white space, the focus of the panel is on the few outlines made by the artist and author Murasaki Yamada. The quiet prologue of the story is the only section that contains slight blue hues, with the shadowing priming the audience to the emotional suppression and detachment that Chiharu has been facing. The outline becomes more fluid, and wispier lines appear when the character is angry, almost as if to depict her world as gradually falling. At times, the art creatively implements these feelings of hers into almost cartoon-like figures, such as the ball of anxiety or the heavy luggage that she has been carrying. But mostly, it’s the focus on emotional expressionlessness and dialogue that heightens the reading experience. The abstract art combined with Chiharu’s inner dialogue opens a window into the life of the Japanese housewife in the 1980s.

I give Talk To My Back a five-star rating. It’s something anyone can read and get something from, whether it be life lessons or a sense of comfort knowing others have felt this way before. Many women will be able to relate to this story, but it doesn’t require one to be a housewife to empathize with her; the quiet frustrations, longing for identity and freedom, and the feeling of being unseen, unheard, or drifting through expectations speak to anyone.