In June 2015 Kabi Nagata was 28 years old and had never had sex, a relationship or a real job - so she decided to get the sex thing over with by hiring a female escort! My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness explores Nagata’s numerous mental health issues and neuroses that led to her predicament - among other things - and how she overcame it.
I really like Kabi Nagata, or at least the version of her we see in her manga. She’s aware of her problems and none of them are flattering, but she still puts it all out there, knowing people are going to judge her, and still doing it regardless - for someone who presents herself as fragile and pathetic, that’s a genuinely brave thing to do. So is taking action to improve her lot - this is no small thing either.
So, while I did enjoy her first manga, I wanted to like this book more than I did. And maybe I would have if this was my first exposure to Kabi Nagata but it’s not - I’ve read her two later books, My Alcoholic Escape from Reality and My Wandering Warrior Existence - so I was aware of her past problems and insecurities before picking up this book.
Not that it’s repetitive - she goes into a lot more detail of her unique thought processes behind her sometimes-mystifying actions; possibly too much detail as it gets overwhelming at times - but maybe I would’ve been more impressed if this was the first time reading about her life. As it is, the familiarity took away some of the freshness of the material.
Or maybe it was the relative thinness of the material that underwhelmed me. Nagata gives us a biography of her life, the problems she’s faced as an adult and then hires an escort. It’s not the most driving of narratives.
That said, Nagata’s certainly an interesting protagonist. She has body image issues due to cutting scars from when she was younger, a bald spot from when she had fits of hair-pulling, went through a phase of starving herself and then another of binge-eating, and fantasises about her mother. And all that knowing, having read her later books, the other problems she’s going to have to face soon!
The story is really about Nagata moving away from a damaging persona that wanted to please her emotionally-unavailable parents above all else, which was never going to happen, and become her true self. This meant not just embracing her homosexuality but admitting that she was never going to be an ordinary office worker with a regular salary, but a nonfiction mangaka.
It’s an uplifting and inspiring story and I was cheering for Nagata the whole time. She comes off as a very sweet person that you easily root for (she doesn’t even really want sex - she just wants to hug and be hugged in return; dawww!) and good for her not letting low self-esteem, mental health problems, etc. hold her down and defeat her in a way that it has defeated so many people (take the hikikomori “shut-in” phenomenon in Japan for example). And who knows how many people she might be helping relate to her through her honesty.
Obviously being a nonfiction mangaka was the perfect job for her as this and the other books she’s created since attest to. Going through the journey of her many mental health issues over and over can be a tad wearying at times but ultimately My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is a rewarding read about the struggle of personal growth. Go Kabi!
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