Una mujer de espaldas / Talk to My Back

Un manga de culto imprescindible de Yamada Murasaki, una autora aún inédita en España, feminista y máxima exponente del manga alternativo de finales de siglo.

Ambientada en un complejo de apartamentos de las afueras de Tokio, Una mujer de espaldas explora el desmoronamiento de los ideales de la clase media suburbana japonesa a través de la relación de una madre con sus dos hijas a medida que estas maduran y afirman su independencia, y con su esposo ausente, que a veces confunde a su mujer con una empleada doméstica. A través de su dibujo sencillo y expresivo, la autora captura cada cambio de humor y cada contradicción interna de Chiharu; tanto su culpa como su anhelo. Murasaki fue de las primeras creadoras que huyó del romanticismo idealizado del shôjo y utilizó la libertad expresiva del manga para abordar la domesticidad y la feminidad de una manera realista, crítica y sostenida.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

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.