Writer and Artist: Fumi Yoshinaga
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| via Wikipedia |
Yukiko is a career woman in her thirties who still lives with her mother, though the relationship is not an easy one. Tensions mount when Mom announces she's getting married - to a man younger than Yukiko. The rest of the book explores the relationships both romantic and familial of Yukiko and her circle of friends. The themes are subtle ones: no relationship is ever simple and what one sees from the outside is never the whole story.
All My Darling Daughters is a josei manga, meaning it is targeted to women, ages 15-44. The North American publisher recommends it for older teens, probably about right. The sexual content, while far from pornographic, is too heavy for me to simply hand it to my twelve-year-old daughter. I enjoyed the book but was not swept away by it. The stories are sophisticated and the artwork competent. Explorations of sexual politics in Japan are always interesting to me and the balancing of personal and professional lives is a hot topic there now. So, I'd say it's a good book, not a great one.
Not something I'll go out of my way to find, then.
ReplyDeleteNo I wouldn't. I can come up with plenty of manga to recommend more highly.
DeleteYou are right. Japanese views of intimacy are very different.
ReplyDeleteWell, really it's the status of women that's different: in the family, in a romantic relationship and in the workplace. Or maybe it's not so different from what it was in the West in another era. Women's Lib didn't cross the Pacific.
DeleteI wonder at the necessity of staying with one's parents until married. It truly does sound like this harkens to that mythical Golden Years Gone By...of US sexual politics. Not that the liberation is complete, mind.
ReplyDeleteSocietal expectations aren't really quite that strict. There are plenty of single men and women who live alone and in fact, Yukiko moves out to live with her boyfriend. Apartment rent in Tokyo is downright extortionate, though, so often people live with their parents out of economic necessity.
DeleteBut Japan definitely lags behind in terms of the status of women and that is apparent in this book.