Maki Fujiwara

This is a frustrating book.

First, I only read it as part of a project to read all the books on NPR's Favorite Graphic Novels list (see below), but it doesn't really fit my definition of a graphic novel. Each diary entry is a block of typeset text facing a full-page illustration. There is no sequential storytelling. I feel misled, though that's not fault of this book.

Second, like many a diary, this one rocks steady, almost daily entries for four months, but then the diarist loses momentum and finishes out the entire rest of the year with only four entries created months apart. So it feels very incomplete, just a very brief dip into someone's life with little context and dangling threads left all over the place.

Third, the translator does try to provide context in an afterword, and while he pays some lip service to wanting to center the author as her own person and artist, he cannot keep himself from making the essay mostly about her husband, the mangaka Yoshiharu Tsuge, and the insights Maki Fujiwara provides into his life and art. Frankly, I really dislike Tsuge's work -- see The Man Without Talent and Red Flowers -- and the persona he projects into them. He's not a guy I would choose to spend more time with, and yet here he is in all his pathetic glory.

It speaks to how charming Fujiwara's art is and how sparkling her personality is that I still like this book despite all the above. I kept flashing to The Emotional Load: And Other Invisible Stuff as I followed this housewife through the daily travails of keeping house, especially when living with a sensitive child and a husband who is mostly disengaged from the family. Sure, it gets a little repetitive as we see so much cleaning, run so many errands, and loop through so many colds and other viruses making their way through the family, but I enjoyed keeping up with Fujiwara even as things turn darker with a moment of domestic violence and her husband's growing mental health crisis.

The final frustration: it's a shame this talented person wasn't able to express herself more fully before her death.

(Best of 2023 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto NPR's Books We Love 2023: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels list.)… (mehr)