It is special to read a comic which not only stands on its own as a great work in the medium but also forces the reader to reexamine an artist’s prior work and appreciate their voice in a new light. For example, Jim Woodring’s Fran warps and unravels his already opus-culminating Congress of the Animals by introducing sexual anxiety to the surreal world of Frank, which had previously avoided confronting troubles such as gender. M.S. Harkness’ recent Time Under Tension revisits her earlier Tinderella by unveiling her personal struggles continuing as that graphic novel reached publication. Comics like these are transformative reading, suggesting new ways of thinking about an author and perhaps new ways of seeing the world.
Second Hand Love, a new collection of Yamada Murasaki’s gekiga works translated by Ryan Holmberg from Drawn and Quarterly, is a transformative work of this nature. Yamada’s prior Garo magazine serial Talk To My Back is a poetic, understated series of vignettes depicting the daily life of a housewife who gradually learns her husband is cheating on her and finds an outlet for her frustration in art. It’s easy to read parallels to Yamada’s own life as housewife turned feminist cartoonist in these stories, which train their focus on the overlooked labor of domestic work. The two stories in this collection revisit the theme of women’s unseen labor and cheating husbands. This time, however, these stories are told from the perspective of the other woman, the mistress.
A Blue Flame, the longest story in this collection, ran in the seinen magazine Comic Morning, and one imagines that for this reason focuses on pretty girls in fashionable outfits, but is nonetheless of a piece with Yamada’s less commercial outings. Emi is a young woman alienated by her life, a comfortable and pointless office job. She has recently been dumped, she slumps down in her sparsely decorated apartment as if a part of the creases of her unmade bed. The titular blue flame burns within her, a flame she calls despair, “the light of your own refusal to give up and vanish entirely.” As if manifesting that despair, a man emerges at her door, sporting a five o’clock shadow and a bouquet of flowers, literally growling. It’s her lover, a married man. He appears like a phantom at the outskirts of Emi’s interiority, policing Emi’s rich inner world with the promise of meeting her endless needs. Emi is not so different from the housewife in Talk To My Back – she is persistent, thoughtful and fascinating, and yet trapped in a situation where she pushes her life down under the expectation that she must structure her life around a man who is largely absent.
Throughout A Blue Flame we are shown the work that Emi puts into maintaining her affair. There is the emotional labor of being happy for her lover, holding back frustrations to please him, the very physical work of making herself attractive. However, Yamada’s real focus is on the labor and attendant social pressures of hiding an affair, pressures which Emi experiences alone as she pretends to be no different from her friends and coworkers, walks past her lover with his family as if they are strangers, all while finding herself responsible for reassuring her lover as his guilt and fear of discovery heightens. A rare moment of true freedom emerges for Emi as she does her laundry on a Sunday, thinking to herself, “Cleanliness is victory… laundry is love… to me, anyway.” Perhaps at this moment, working for herself is what makes Emi so happy. The thought is quickly banished, Emi’s monologue turns to wishing she could share her quiet Sunday with her man and attributes her fondness for being alone to bad weather.
Emi’s malaise heightens, her frustration with her lover’s shallow fears and self-centered dependence consumes her thoughts. “I was feeling sad and lonely,” she muses, “I want him to hold me. I want him to want me. [...] He just lies there silently, stubbornly… as if feeling lonely inherently made one good.” Where the heroine of Talk To My Back chooses art as a way out of her suffering, Emi chooses marriage, accepting the proposal of her ex-boyfriend and breaking the cycle of her empty affair. Her fiance may be no better, an indecisive, awkward man who has admitted breaking another engagement to pursue Emi. Emi’s decision is not a celebratory embrace of marital normalcy but the culmination of her dedication to a hope for something better that might appear from another angle to be despair, the blue flame that refuses to waver.
The title story, Second Hand Love, also focuses on the girlfriend of a married man. Like Emi, Yuko is “just lonely. I just wanted a man who wanted me.” In the first chapter, Yuko is in the same discontented place as Emi, frustrated by her lover’s late arrival and folding laundry to blow off steam, musing to herself that she doesn’t even like this man. However, from the second chapter on, Yuko leaves this space. Yuko leaves to visit her family home, as her father has recently retired. Brushing off questions of when she will get married and helping out with household chores, Yuko remembers a childhood of unexplained gifts and her late mother’s obvious resentment of her spouse. Later, Yuko’s father confesses what Yuko clearly already knows – he cheated on his late wife, had an affair much like the affair Yuko has lately found herself in. “Men get like this when they retire,” Yuko muses, “Despite being surrounded by their family, they realize that they are essentially alone. [...] Women, on the other hand, realize they’re alone the minute they get married.” In this brief story without resolution, Yuko sits at an intersection of awareness of her mother, the suffering housewife, and herself, the suffering lover. Her father’s guilt reveals him no different than all the men who have been in Yuko’s life – and Yamada’s comics – his guilt is little more than an awakening to the loneliness which drove him to play his part in a generational cycle of monogamy and cheating, isolated women and absent men, a story without end.
Talk To My Back is an amazing comic, but its focus on the interiority of one woman – the suffering housewife – omits the voice of the other woman in a story of infidelity entirely such that she might as well exist as nothing more than an extension of the cheating husband. This role is transformed in A Blue Flame, which charts the interiority of a mistress with the very same intensity. The reader of both works is invited to notice that these two, wife and mistress, are not so different, that they share the same struggle. However, it is a subversive work – I imagine the majority male readership of Comic Morning accepted the criticism of cheating husbands more readily without the presence of any sympathetic wives. Second Hand Love finally renders any question of Yamada’s focus unshakeable, tying the themes of her prior works together with what is at once her most ambiguous narrative and her clearest statement – that women suffer deeply under patriarchy and that men recognize the harm in their role far too late to meaningfully affect the cycle. Each story iterates on the last and affirms its voice as greater than before. The heroine of Talk To My Back found independence through artistic expression like Yamada herself. Emi and Yuko may not find a clear path out, but find a bit of fire in knowing their conditions and knowing who they are, deep down. Yamada loves all these women in her comics. Read together, Yamada’s comics speak to the life of a woman who loved herself.
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