This review contains extremely minor spoilers to a couple of the 36 chapters and should not change the experience of reading it much more than the description available on anilist

Talk to My Back is hard to compare to other comics I’ve read. It… sort of? has the tone of a feminist novel. When its prose swells and flourishes it can remind you that Yamada Murasaki is an essayist. I tried to explain it to a friend and the comparison I’ve settled on is that it feels like a long conversation with my mother, but only at the tail-end. What I mean by that is, there is a recurring kind of conversation where my mother will be talking about something mostly innocuous until she casually mentions some horrific or deeply sad moment in her life. I don’t say this to cast my mother as some sort of martyr or perpetual victim, but rather to say that I’m familiar with these particularly constricting moments of domestic life that Talk to My Back paint.

My mother for a huge portion of her life was the perpetual caretaker wherever she was. Her parents adopted her when they were in their late forties and her mother suffered from Alzheimer’s. After her mother’s passing she worked in a nursing home next door to where we lived. Like Chiharu’s children I was somewhat aware of her efforts but it was not something I really had the capacity to understand. My mother is still alive, but due to a fusion in her lumbar, arthritis crawled up her spine and around 2015 she managed to convince the state of Georgia that she was disabled. As I’ve gotten older, especially after I moved out, I found myself able to have more honest conversations with her. Part of this is because of a scare with PRES, but I really started finally putting in some sort of effort to understand my mother as a person that exists outside of the lens of family.

I can’t speak on the dynamic of my parent’s marriage outside of its disintegration. They became close friends after their divorce and it was hard to tell if my father’s prolonged pining was sincere regret or an affectionate performance. I say that because Talk to My Back definitely reminds me of the tonal whiplash that occasionally happens when my mother and I talk for a long time, but it is, of course, a very different situation. Chiharu has different reactions. Chiharu’s thoughts are not cushioned like my mother’s thoughts are. Talk to My Back is equally frank with its delight and anguish and it does not concern itself with the audience’s opinion of Chiharu.

For instance, her patience runs out with a friend who she finds irritatingly fixated on the woman her husband got pregnant:

Chiharu isn’t meant to solely be a vessel of the message. That would be flattening. She has to run contrary to herself. She has to fail her children sometimes. The freedom spoken of in the corners of every chapter would be hollow if Chiharu couldn't afford to be petty. When I say, the freedom spoken of, I mean the dissolution of the family. Talk to My Back understands that the family, as a structure, may create purpose and moments of profundity, but it also serves to insulate its members from community. It also understands that the father, which may position itself as a member of the family, is something altogether different:

While I think the throughline of the story is about the family’s capacity to box in women through obligation and financial dependance, Talk to My Back remembers to fill its story with people. For every moment of gentle revolutionary suggestion, Chiharu brags about her kid not crying from the flu shot and contrasts it with her own memories of boo-hooing. Yes she’s suffocated by the expectations of her husband but she also loves being outside during a heavy rain.