On the Coffee Table: Talk to My Back

Title: Talk to My Back

Writer and Artist: Yamada Murasaki

via Amazon

In 1981, Yamada Murasaki created a manga series for Garo magazine, an influential platform for alternative and avant-garde comics.  Talk to My Back depicts a woman navigating her difficult, though hardly unusual, relationships with her husband and their young children.  Murasaki accomplishes quite a lot with a little.  The artwork is sparse in the extreme.  Facial features are notably absent in many panels, enhancing the loneliness of the protagonist's world.

Feminism has a much quieter voice in Japan than it does in the West.  Women wanting to be more than wives and mothers has been a central message of American feminism at least since the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique in 1963.  Even by the time I was in Japan in the mid-to-late '90s, typical views were archaic.  

Quiet, however, does not mean subtle.  Talk to My Back is a powerful work.  There's no mistaking the resentment and isolation revealed.   And I'm confident there are women throughout the world who often find themselves in similar emotional circumstances.  Unreasonable expectations are placed on women, period - in the home, in the workplace, in society at large. 

Don't think so?  What was one of the first criticisms leveled at Kamala Harris when she became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President?  She has no children.  No politician would ever dare hold that against a man.  Harris is a woman so evidently it's okay.  It's disgusting.  Thankfully, the Republican ticket seems to be suffering a political price for their idiotic and hateful rhetoric.

Yeah, I know I've promised to keep the Squid apolitical but seriously, if you're not yet convinced that Donald Trump shouldn't be President, I don't even know where to start with you.  Hate mongering is not politics.  It's just gross.

I'm getting off topic (sort of).  Talk to My Back gives you a lot to think about regardless of your sex, gender or political affiliation.  Or at least, it should.  It's the sort of work that should make you uncomfortable.  I won't ever claim to be a perfect husband.  I know my wife feels unappreciated at times and she's right to, not because I don't try but because too often, I don't think.  Reading a book like this is an important kick in the pants.

If this sort of book "offends" you, well, I'm not sure where to start.  It's a book I feel everyone should read.  It gets to the heart of why families - all families - are difficult, and likely more so for the women involved.