Talk to My Back

Yamada Murasaki's Talk To My Back is a celebrated masterwork that explores the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams through a woman's relationship with her two daughters and her husband. It was the first cartoonist in Japan to use the expressive freedoms of alt-manga to address domesticity and womanhood in a realistic, critical, and sustained way.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 384 pages
Publication date: 12 July 2022
Publisher: Drawn and Quarterly

Now that we have awakened from the dream, what are we going to do? Chiharu ponders to herself, gently rubbing her husband's head affectionately. Set in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Tokyo, Yamada Murasaki's Talk To My Back (1981-84) delves into the unraveling of Japan's suburban middle-class aspirations through a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, as well as with her husband, who works late and views 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 hinder 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 being 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 alt-manga 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 Eisner-nominated Ryan Holmberg.

Dimension: 213 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781770465633