Week 8 | Gender & Sexuality

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness

Kabi Nagata's deeply personal autobiographical work explores her harsh struggles with mental health, social connections, sexuality, and perhaps most importantly, acceptance. This is not my first time reading this work, in fact I remember waiting for chapter translations to come out as it first cropped up on scanlation sites in 2016. No matter how many times I read it, Nagata's frankness and ability to lay everything bare continues to draw me in.

As I mentioned, acceptance is one of the big themes, if not the biggest, of My Lesbian Experience. The book at face value seems to sell itself as a tale focusing on sex and the sex industry; it's kind of hard not to think that when looking at the cover. However, the incident with Nagata and the sex worker instead feels like the spark to her introspection that leads her to unpack everything that brought her to this situation. Looking back on her life experiences, she realizes she was mainly driven by the desire to be accepted by her parents, her peers, and ultimately society as a whole. The constant pressure to present a false version of herself to others while neglecting her own needs caused her to eventually realize that there was a form of acceptance she forgot about: self-acceptance. By allowing herself the liberty to explore her sexuality, she is able to pivot her thoughts from, "What can I do to please others" to "What can I do to please myself."

While I have read My Lesbian Experience a couple times now, I was unaware that Nagata's sequel work, My Solo Exchange Diary, had already been translated online, so I was eager to take the chance to follow up on how she has been. It continues directly after the events of My Lesbian Experience and discusses how publishing her work has impacted her everyday life. She tackles it in a different way this time though. Instead of writing about her life in a memoir-like fashion, she handles it like a diary entry addressed to herself, hence the name solo exchange diary. Because of this, the sequel feels even more personal than before. It is much less about Nagata sharing her story with the world and more a way for her to cope with her ongoing situation by making her thoughts tangible. The personal time she takes to create this manga allows her to better understand the parts of her she had repressed all these years. I truly wish Nagata all the best in the future.

My Brother's Husband

My Brother's Husband by Gengoroh Tagame is a slice-of-life manga following an independent father, Yaichi, and his daughter, Kana, who are one day visited by Yaichi's deceased twin brother's husband, Mike (I'm sorry that was such a mouthful). Unlike My Lesbian Experience, this work's main focus is to bring to light LGBT issues within Japanese society.

That still counts as foreign, Mike

Tagame brings to light the nature of homophobia in Japan and how it isn't as outright as we may see in the West. During the first few chapters, Yaichi tackles his internalized homophobia as he tries to figure out how he should act around Mike, a gay man. His thoughts of how he wants to act in situations are quickly overwritten though by his immediate reaction to be polite. Eventually, Yaichi recounts the moment his brother came out to him as a gay man and his reaction was simply, "Huh...That so..." It goes to the idea that while people in Japan may not treat queer people with outright malice, they tend to ignore their identity and opt for the "if we don't talk about it, it doesn't exist" route.

While this sort of ignore method seems more forgiving at first, it continues to reinforce the alienation of the LGBT community. It's not something only limited to Japan, but definitely an issue that's spread across Asian countries with the hide your "shame" mentality. This issue is tackled during an episode of a queer conversations podcast I listen to, Nancy. The co-host, Kathy Tu, comes out to her very Chinese mother. For the third time. This time, recorded. Dismayed at how her previous two attempts had been shut down and never talked about again, Kathy hopes to understand why her mother refuses to at least acknowledge her identity. Give it a listen or check out the transcript [Here].

Although My Brother's Husband touches on homophobia, it crafts together a positive story of understanding and over coming prejudices. The most pivotal character to Yaichi's character development is Kana. She quickly warms up to Mike with no prior social prejudices to influence her judgment of him. Her innocent confusion over why people believe Mike is a bad influence teaches Yaichi that there truly is no reason to treat Mike differently. Later on after Yaichi's ex-wife is introduced, Tagame continues to reinforce the idea that a family can come in any shape or size.

I rate this manga with 17 detailed muscles and a box of mac and cheese.