Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Talk to My Back

Talk to My Back

Holmberg, Ryan
Murasaki, Yamada

Paperback

General Graphic NovelsGeneral Manga

Publisher Price: $29.95

ISBN10: 1770465634
ISBN13: 9781770465633
Publisher: Drawn & Quarterly
Published: Jul 12 2022
Pages: 368
Weight: 1.70
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.19 Depth: 8.35
Language: English

A celebrated masterwork shimmering with vulnerability from one of alt-manga's most important female artists.

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, Murasaki Yamada's Talk to My Back (1981-84) explores the fraying of Japan's suburban middle-class dreams through a woman's relationship with her two daughters as they mature and assert their independence, and with her husband, who works late and sees 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 fetter 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 having been 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.

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