Translation: Jocelyne Allen
Letters: Karis Page
Cover Design: Nicky Lim
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness opens with mangaka Kabi Nagata attempting to have sex while inside a Love Hotel room with an escort she hired from a lesbian escort agency. She’s sitting on one end of the bed wearing a terrified expression on her face. Nagata is 28 years old, never been kissed, never been in a relationship, and has only recently come to the realization that she prefers women. She’s spent most of her youth suffering from bouts of depression, manifested in her life as eating disorders, acts of self harm, an inability to hold down a steady job, or form lasting friendships. So, off course she’s scared. The book’s opening (and its risque cover) initially produced an expectation that this would be a story of sexual hijinks, the stress of dating, and the difficulties of being single in the modern world. But I suspect that those thoughts were conditioned by the consumption of too much Hollywood entertainment. What actually follows is an extended and earnest bout of self-examination, gradually leading Nagata to the realization about how much she’s been suppressing her own sexuality in order to fulfill her own preconceptions about responsible adult behaviour.
Nagata’s focus is narrow. She talks about the toll depression took on her own health with great candor. By her own telling, the problems began when she dropped out of university. The resulting loss of a sense of direction would make her extremely anxious. But even securing a part-time job fails to deliver for Nagata the sense of belonging she desperately craves. On the contrary, her self-harm and eating disorders escalate to the point she has to be hospitalized. In one of the most harrowing moments in the manga, Nagata is overcome by an intense desire to eat while in the middle of her shift. She starts stuffing a bowl of uncooked instant ramen into her mouth, but is forced to stop when she notices how the hard noodles have torn into her gums and caused Nagata's mouth to bleed.
But this isn’t a tell-all book. Nagata’s increasing self-awareness forces her to confront how her emotionally stunted relationship with her parents has shamed her into feeling completely inadequate as a functioning adult. There’s a lot of ground to be covered here which Nagata declines to explore in greater detail. She also keeps her portrayal of other supporting characters similarly nebulous. They’re mainly described as either being disapproving or supportive towards her. Every act of kindness shown to her tends to overwhelm the inexperienced Nagata. This includes the escort from the book’s opening. As a mangaka, her primary source of information about sex are the doujinshi she’s read. And as a client, Nagata prefers to ignore the economic nature of the transaction she initiated and would rather project an artificial intimacy to their encounter. But it’s arguably an illusion she needs to maintain just to make it through what is to her a new experience.
The loosely drawn chibi style Nagata employs is both very conventional and a little unusual. Mangaka often use it for the bonus material included at the end of a manga volume, and it helps establish a tone of breezy intimacy between author and reader. But it’s not something typically employed for the long-form narrative. The most eye-catching part of the book's design is the pleasant tri-color scheme (black and white, plus pink) which belies the subject matter within. Otherwise, this aesthetic can sometimes appear a bit too generic.
But it’s not hard to feel for Nagata. Her vulnerability is genuine. And it’s painful to witness her toil so hard to achieve any sense of self-worth after a decade of feeling useless. Whatever Nagata’s particular circumstances, there’s something all-too familiar about the struggle to overcome loneliness.
