Chiharu Yamakawa is a Japanese housewife in the 1980s, married to a typical salaryman with two young daughters and a cat. The strips in this collection, first published from 1981 to 1984, show an unromantic view of married life and parenthood through a realistic lens.
I wanted to like Yamada Murasaki’s Talk To My Back more than I did as I’m a huge fan of manga and slice-of-life comics. And kudos to her for showing an unvarnished perspective of being a housewife, particularly in a conservative culture like Japan’s - I’m sure the strips must’ve felt like a breath of fresh air when they first appeared over 40 years ago - but, for me anyway, all it comes down to is just not finding the comics themselves that interesting to read.
Chiharu feels trapped at times by her kids and husband, and even like a slave (Japanese men from an older generation tended to treat wives like servants - some still do). She feels the romance leaving her relationship. She decides upon a radical course of action by getting a part-time job (it was a different time). There’s the usual stuff around domesticity: the cat runs away, kids bully other kids so parents have to have a chat with each other; marital strife; couples arguing over who’s not doing enough parenting; unexpected moments of tenderness and happiness, and so on.
There’s a small semblance of some continuing storylines in Chiharu and her husband’s up and down relationship as she suspects he’s cheating on her, and Chiharu wanting to break up the monotony of domestic life by getting a job and pursuing different careers. It’s all believable, convincing stuff you’d expect to see in a book about home life and families - I just wasn’t that taken with any of it. There’s nothing really that compelling and a lot of it felt like lo-fi soap opera material that’s been done a thousand times before.
Yamada Murasaki was undoubtedly a fine cartoonist with a masterful control of the medium but her slice-of-life manga Talk To My Back didn’t speak to me taste.
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