![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() But there have been lots of women artists in Japan who can’t stand shojo manga and feel suffocated by the expectation that they should make work in that mode. Shojo manga, of course, is very popular, influential, experimental, and often deals with important and interesting issues. ![]() Introduce the two “Garo”-related artists who are pioneers of manga by women, but not necessarily for women, and also who don’t come out of shojo manga. So, if Tsurita was the representative female artist for “Garo” in the late 60s and 70s, then chronologically it made sense to do Yamada next. For various reasons, she’s a representative manga artist of the 80s, both for alt-manga but also manga at large. She’s well known in Japan, but often overlooked in manga history even in Japan because she doesn’t really fit the the general tropes of “manga by women,” something I talk about in the essay. Yamada is an important artist, but oddly neglected. It’s also a continuous story rather than a series of short stories, which I’m told typically sells better. So, the Tsurita Kuniko was the first book and then the follow-up book was Yamada Murasaki’s “Talk to My Back.” I proposed it because I think the story is both charming and honest, and it’s easily package-able as a single volume. RH: Yeah, more like a focused initiative. We’re not necessarily thinking of it as a series, but we do think it important to maintain the momentum and get more of this material out into the world. D&Q was also interested in publishing female alt-manga artists, so there was a lot of synergy. RH: I wanted to do something about Tsurita anyway, but the Honolulu exhibition seemed like the perfect opportunity since the artist’s original artwork was supposed to be in the exhibition. So that’s how Tsurita Kuniko’s “Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud” came about. I wanted to translate something related to come out around the time of the exhibition, in order to support the exhibition with something concrete people could read, but also to use the exhibition as a platform to promote the book. I wrote an essay for it about “The Women of Alternative manga,” a capsule history of especially “Garo” and women artists. The exhibition catalog was completed, though never published – Stephen is looking for a new publisher now. Unfortunately, the exhibition was first suspended because of COVID, and then it was canceled, also because of a change of leadership and priorities at the museum. I was living in Japan at the time, suggested a few artists, and helped put him in touch with a couple of them. The curator, Stephen Salel, organized that exhibition and asked for advice about the new one about women and manga. I had an association with the Honolulu Museum of Art because they had done a smaller exhibition a couple of years prior about two “Garo” artists whom I had translated: Tsuge Tadao and Katsumata Susumu. And by “for girls,” I mean produced for and marketed to that audience, since shojo manga is in practice read by a wide variety of people. It was going to cover the history of shojo manga – manga for girls – for a younger audience and then, coming up to the present, also manga for adult women. Around the same time, the Honolulu Museum of Art was planning a large exhibition about women in manga. But the longer story is, as you know, I had been translating and writing about alternative manga for a number of years, but almost all the artists I translated were male, so I wanted to branch out and cover female artists. Ryan Holmberg: I wrote the essay specifically for that edition. Had you prepared that essay beforehand? Or was it something that you produced at the same time as the translation? So I guess to get us started, what was the order in which “Talk to My Back” came to Drawn and Quarterly, because, as with a lot of their manga publications, there’s usually an essay in the back, especially for classics. ![]()
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