Talk to My Back

An unearthed masterwork from one of the "three daughters of Garo," shimmering with realism and vulnerability

"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, Talk to My Back explores the fraying suburban middle-class dream of the 1980s through Chiharu's relationship with her two young daughters as they mature and begin to assert their independence; and with her husband, who regularly works late and is unable to see his wife as anything more than a mother.

Despite Yamada Murasaki's honest engagement with marriage and motherhood, she is surprisingly generous with the characters that drag her protagonist down. When the husband has a brief affair, Chiharu brushes it off, feeling that she, too, has broken the marital contract by straying from the template of the happy housewife. Instead Yamada saves her harshest criticisms for society at large, particularly its false promises of eternal satisfaction within a family unit--as fears of having been thrown away inside that empty vessel called the household gnaw at Chiharu's soul.

Yamada was the first cartoonist 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 Garo magazine during the early 1980s, and is translated by Eisner award winning Ryan Holmberg.

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