Queer graphic novels are a diverse and growing genre that reflects the diversity of the queer community, they’re full of the real lived experiences of those in the community and fantasy worlds that centre queer love and lives.

In this article, we have attempted to represent a broad scope of queer writers and stories. You’ll find a lesbian memoir, a gay romance, queer graphic novels filled with asexual and non-binary characters, as well as books by trans writers featuring trans characters.

The LGBTQ+ community has stuck its flag in the comics and manga scene, and we are living for it. This list might not be exhaustive by any means, but these are all queer graphic novels and manga that have affected us and we hope that you will love them equally.

Queer Graphic Novels and Manga

From queer memoirs to gay romances to action series’ with queer protagonists, here is a deep and varied list of some of the best queer graphic novels available right now.

Read More: LGBTQ+ Books from Around the World

On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

Tillie Walden is legendary on the queer graphic novel scene by this point but if you have managed to miss this stunning work then here’s your friendly push to pick it up next.

There’s so much going on in this story which balances Star Wars, space adventure romp with multiple timelines, romance, and newfound family.

Every page is more breathtaking in the last, notably the full-art pages which are fully deserving of being framed. The use of red and blue throughout On a Sunbeam is a feast for the eyes and forces you to linger and reread for full impact.

Our main protagonist, Mia, is part of a crew that rebuilds beautiful and broken-down structures throughout space, piecing the past together.

As Mia gets to know her team, who are each well fleshed out with their own stories that become relevant later, we flashback to Mia’s time in a boarding school where she fell in love with a mysterious new student.

Mia finally reveals that she’s joined their ship to track down her lost love. 

Buy a copy of On a Sunbeam

Tip: If you love queer literature, then you’ll love Queer Book Box. You can choose to just receive a handpicked queer book a month or and All Out Box where you’ll get access to a book club, bookish gifts, queer zines and comics plus an all-manner of goodies.

You can receive five pounds off your order by using our Queer Book Box referral link.

Fun Home & Are You My Mother? By Alison Bechdel

Upon its publication, Fun Home very quickly started winning prizes and found itself at the top of many Book of the Year lists. Bechdel herself already had a long and loved career as the cartoonist of Dykes to Watch Out For, but Fun Home propelled her into the literary stratosphere.

Fun Home and its sequel, Are You My Mother? are both biographies that muse on the shaky and threadbare relationships between parents and their children, specifically from the perspective of a queer daughter struggling with her mental health.

Fun Home’s initial conceit is that Bechdel’s own father came out as gay shortly before dying after he was hit by a truck.

Whether or not his death was suicide hangs over the book while Bechdel attempts to piece together her fractured relationship with him, her own queerness, her success, and even her relationship with her psychiatrist.

Are You My Mother? focuses more on Bechdel’s relationship with her mother, both while growing up and as an adult. It’s a quieter book in some respects, but it does go into detail about Bechdel’s ongoing mental health struggles and how they are linked to her upbringing.

Both of these books are gorgeously, intimately drawn and written with such a raw, stripped-bare kind of intensity.

Buy a copy of Fun Home

Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker (with Wendy Xu)

This cozy and colourful YA graphic novel is beautifully diverse and a wonderful portrait of both young queer love and older queer couples with one of my favourite older lesbian couples I’ve seen in literature.

Nova Huang, a teenage witch with a deep knowledge of magic, works at her grandmothers’ bookshop where she helps them loan out spell books and investigate supernatural occurrences in their New England town.

One night, she follows reports of a white wolf into the woods and stumbles upon a shocking sight: her childhood crush, Tam Lang, battling a horse demon.

Against the backdrop of witchcraft, untested magic, occult rituals, and family ties both new and old, Nova and Tam’s latent feelings are rekindled as they work together to unravel the mysteries surrounding Tam’s past and protect the magic of wolves.

Buy a copy of Mooncakes

The Well by Jake Wyatt (with Choo)

In this breathtaking and witty graphic novel, Jake Wyatt and Choo explore the power and limits of wishes in a modern fable rooted in magic and family secrets.

On the archipelago, Lizzy cares for her grandfather and their goats, flirts with the ferrywoman, and avoids the fog and monsters that come with night. But when she steals coins from a sacred well to cover a debt, her life is turned upside down.

The well demands repayment in wishes, and its minions will drown Lizzy if she doesn’t comply. To break the curse, Lizzy must uncover hidden memories, bestow wealth, and face the magical secrets that nearly destroyed her family before it’s too late.

If you love fantasy adventure stories, don’t miss this wonderful queer graphic novel.

Buy a copy of The Well

When I Came Out by Anne Mette Kaerulf Lorentzen

Translated from the Danish by Charlotte Barslund

When many graphic novels and novels featuring LGBTQ+ stories are aimed at young adults and tell the stories of young adults, it’s refreshing to read the memoir of someone who has taken a longer route to discover their sexuality.

Louise, our protagonist, has been married for twenty years to her husband and has four children but is realising that she’s not being honest with herself and yearns for a relationship with another woman.

When We Came Out takes us on a trip through her life as she recounts those subtle signs that were always there and ultimately her journey towards coming out. It’s funny, poignant, and you truly bond with Lousie from the get-go.

With elegant anthropomorphic pink and green drawings taking us through the story, this is a delightful and uplifting queer graphic novel that needs to be read.

Buy a copy of When I Came Out

Read More: Books to Read Before You Visit Denmark

Bloom by Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau

Now here is a meet cute: a young baker, sick of his job and anything to do with it, falls for an interviewee looking to take over his job, spurred on by his passion for baking. This is a sweet and charming story of blossoming queer love, to say the least.

Bloom also doubles as a phenomenal celebration of baking and baked goods in general, thanks to Ganucheau’s lovingly rich and detailed visual descriptions of the food which plays such a major role in the story.

This loving detail carried on to the rich and lived-in environments and the characters’ expressions and posture. This is an artist with a sense of personality and place.

Buy a copy of Bloom

Lumberjanes

Here is a queer graphic novel that had an exciting start in life and continued to morph, change, and develop as time went by.

Initially created by Noelle Stevenson and drawn by Grace Ellis, multiple writers and artists have now worked on the series, including transgender writer Lilah Sturgess, who penned Lumberjanes: The Infernal Compass.

Lumberjanes began as a celebration of female strength and friendship. It’s a corny, cheeky, cheerful comic book series that pops with colour and goofy humour. A campy, raucous ride for all ages.

Having been taken on by multiple writers and artists over the years, however, its diversity has grown and spread, celebrating not only women but also queer people of all shapes and sizes.

Buy a copy of Lumberjanes

Heartstopper by Alice Oseman

Alice Oseman is a big name in the YA genre these days, covering various avenues of queerness with her comics and novels. Her book Loveless is both a lesson in, and a poignant letter to, asexuality and aromanticism. But if you’re looking for a beautiful queer graphic novel, check out her series Heartstopper.

Heartstopper is something of a spin-off from Oseman’s debut novel Solitaire, focussing on the blossoming gay romance of the brother of that book’s protagonist.

As its cover succinctly explains, this is the story of boy meets boy, with Charlie — an out but awkward gay British teenager — gently falling in love with the more traditionally jockish Nick.

What makes Heartstopper such a breath of fresh air, both in the romance genre and as a queer graphic novel, is its approach to romantic tropes.

Quite often, the book will teasingly lean into a cliche about arguments, misunderstandings, or poor communication, only to resolve, circumvent, or even outright poke fun at that trope. This leads to a very fresh and refreshing kind of gay romance story.

Lovingly drawn and written with charming awkwardness, Heartstopper delivers moments that’ll make you crease up and squeal with excitement, and others that’ll have you sighing and swooning with love and sympathy for its characters.

This queer graphic novel isn’t just a delightful story; it’s a celebration of young gay romance.

Buy a copy of Heartstopper

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me

Freddy is trapped in a toxic on-off relationship with her girlfriend Laura Dean who repeatedly blows hot and cold, treats her badly, and messes around with other women.

Freddy gets in touch with advice columnist Anna Vice to work through her emotions and become a better friend after spending so much time absorbed in her relationship and letting everyone else down.

A highly relatable, high-school drama that deals with some tough themes like abortion. It’s refreshing to see an example of a Lesbian relationship with problems we often only see in heteronormative stories, that also has a happy ending.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is also beautifully drawn and coloured in black and pink.

Buy a copy of Laura Dean

How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual by Rebecca Burgess

Very slowly, more ace fiction and nonfiction is being introduced into the world as awareness is raised and more people are sharing their own stories.

While there’s a long way to go in terms of good ace representation in popular media, this graphic memoir is an important read for anyone and a must-read for aces of all ages.

Feeling different and alone in your feelings is inevitable at times for ace (asexual) or aro (aromantic) people with a world that pushes romance and sex as the norm and ignores the other relationships that bond us – like friendship and familial.

So, reading Rebecca Burgess’s colourful memoir, and other recent novels like Alice Oseman’s Loveless, can certainly help with that feeling even if many of us wish they existed while we were in school.

How to be Ace takes us through Rebecca’s life from her school life where she was bullied and confused to an adult struggling with her identity and experiencing anxiety and OCD. It’s insightful, honest, and depicts asexual relationships in ways that we’re yet to see elsewhere.

Buy a copy of How to Be Ace

Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe

Being queer — and, more specifically, being gender queer — means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But most of us have struggled with our identity and how we outwardly project ourselves to others at some point or another.

In Gender Queer, writer and artist Maia Kobabe retraces their own journey through life as a gender queer individual.

This is a queer graphic memoir which traces the steps of a life lived, as well as one explored and tested. The journey to understanding Maia’s own non-binary identity and asexuality, while traversing a gendered and binary world, is a fascinating one.

It will either draw out empathy and understanding from other queer readers, or will offer invaluable insight into this queer world for those who reside outside of it.

Buy a copy of Gender Queer

Read More: 9 Transgender Stories and Books by Trans Writers

Stone Fruit by Lee Lai

Stone Fruit has a simple premise that delivers a quietly heartbreaking and tender story with a very real look at when relationships break down due to mental health issues and unresolved family trauma.

Bron and Ray are a queer couple who enjoy their role as the fun weirdo aunties to Ray’s niece, six-year-old Nessie enjoying escaping into the fantasy world they create together.

Bron, a trans woman estranged from her religious family is struggling with wanting to reconnect with her terrible family, and address her declining mental health. Ray struggles with Bron’s emotional absence and her own fraught relationship with her sister.

The unifier in Stone Fruit is Nessie who loves both of them and creates a special bond between the three that remains past Ray and Bron’s relationship breaking down highlighting the beauty of found family.

Buy a copy of Stone Fruit

Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Monstress is a lot. This is a deep dive into fantasy fiction that has far more lore, history, and politics wrapped up in it than your average comic book.

This queer comic carries the weight and intensity of a fantasy epic, and its incredible scope can be as daunting as it is impressive. But in her world-building, Marjorie Liu has achieved so much.

First off, she has created a compelling yet terrifying matriarchal society with so many intricate moving parts.

Secondly, she has carved out a powerful queer protagonist in Maika Halfwolf, a stoic and often terrifying main character. This is a delightfully gay story set in a gritty and dark steampunk world.

Fantastical and overflowing with imagination and narrative worldbuilding, Monstress can often feel overwhelming but having a protagonist as elegant yet gruesome as Maika, and having her be queer (and not the only queer character either) is endlessly exciting.

Monstress is an Image Comics series beloved by fans and a wonderful example of how to writer a powerful queer protagonist.

Buy a copy of Monstress

Read More: Best Batman Comics for New Readers

Bingo Love by Tee Franklin, Jenn St. Onge, and Joy San

This is something you so rarely see in any kind of medium — queer, cis, gay, straight, whatever — and that is a romance between two older people. Love stories are often reserved for the young and the spritely.

But here is a queer comic book that features two women of colour in their mid-sixties, falling in love and enjoying their own queer romance.

The story begins with tragedy, as our protagonists fall in love at a young age but are forced apart and into more traditional marriages by family and societal pressures.

When they reunite so many years later, they get a second chance at love and life together. Bingo Love is a wonderful queer romance that will make you sing.

Buy a copy of Bingo Love

Lights, Planets, People by Molly Naylor (& Lizzy Stewart

A beautiful graphic novel that sees right into your soul and revels in picking apart your own worst anxieties. The narrative flits between renowned astronomer Maggie Hil lecturing a hall of students as she attempts to inspire young women to work in science and her first therapy session.

Here Maggie discusses, with difficulty, her own neurodivergence, mental health, problems with being in relationships (focusing specifically on her recent relationship with Jane), and her intense desire to make a difference to the world through her work.

The full-page spreads and art in Lights, Planets, People will take your breath away. Avery Press is publishing some of the most exciting queer graphic novels at the moment, and this is one of their best.

Buy a copy of Lights, Planets, People

Best Queer Manga

Queer manga has a long and interesting history with distinct genres being prominent from the 1970s onwards including Yaoi, or Boy’s Love and Yuri  Girl’s Love from the 1970s onwards. Here are a few very recent collections to get you started on your LGBTQ+ manga journey.

My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness & My Solo Exchange Diary by Kabi Nagata

My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is a graphic memoir written and drawn with a raw honesty. It opens your eyes to an important yet painful reality in Japan, all through the use of dark humour, minimalist art, and self-acceptance.

This queer memoir tells the story of Kabi, a woman who decided against attending university, and spent her early twenties in a haze of depression, drifting through jobs at stores and bakeries and, when she finds the energy to do so, she writes manga.

Eventually, she arrives, age twenty-eight, at a turning point. She decides to hire a female escort and a room at a love hotel, in order to learn and understand all that she believes she has missed out on in her youth.

The art of My Lesbian Experience With Lonliness, made up of pastel pinks against thick blacks and empty whites, is stunning. It has a calming energy that offsets the bleak humour and tragic personal tales.

But it meshes beautifully with this sense of opening up, risking pain and vulnerability, in the search for acceptance and happiness. The sequel My Solo Exchange Diary take us further into Kabi’s life.

Buy a copy of My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness

Read More: Best Asian Graphic Novels

My Brother’s Husband Gengoroh Tagame

My Brother’s Husband tells the story of Yaichi, single father of his kawaii-as-hell daughter Kana, and the arrival of the bear-like Canadian, Mike, who has come to share grief and comfort over the loss of his husband, and Yaichi’s twin brother, Ryoji.

It is made clear from the start that Yaichi never quite accepted his brother’s sexuality, nor his immigration to Canada. On top of that, the theme of acceptance is hammered home by Kana, a young and infinitely positive child who sees the good in everything.

My Brother’s Husband is a beautiful, well-crafted queer manga; a tale of family and love. At its core, it really is about nothing more than love in all its forms. It is unrelentingly cute, sweet, and joyous; a celebration of love both familial and romantic, and a true pleasure to read.

Buy a copy of My Brother’s Husband

Our Dreams at Dusk by Yuhki Kamatani

Tasuku Kaname is a gay teenager trying desperately to come to terms with his sexual identity and find peace within it, all the while he is bullied and shunned by his classmates.

Slowly, he is introduced to a selection of colourful queer characters who all have their own struggles and their own lessons to teach Kaname.

Our Dreams at Dusk is a gorgeously drawn queer manga, full of love for the entire queer community. It celebrates the act of love and, specifically, of loving oneself above everything else.

This queer manga explores the dangers of marginalisation and the strength it takes to overcome, find a community, and feel loved. It is very much a story of empathy, love, and community.

Buy a copy of Our Dreams at Dusk

To Strip the Flesh by Oto Toda

Translated by Emily Balistrieri

To Strip the Flesh is a short manga, comprised of just two chapters, which explores the life of a young trans man named Chiaki.

Chiaki lives with his father, a hunter, and makes money from documenting their hunts on YouTube. His followers, however, enjoy seeing his large breasts in tight clothing.

Despite this, and his father’s wish for him to get married and be a beautiful bride, Chiaki has been pursuing HRT and wishes to also have GRS.

Chiaki is attempting to balance what he wants with what he sees as his duty to make his dying father happy.

We watch as their relationship changes and Chiaki finds his own happiness over the course of this short but beautiful queer manga.

Buy a copy of To Strip the Flesh

The Bride was a Boy by Chii

Too many transgender stories end in, or are peppered by, tragedy. The Bride was a Boy bucks that trend by being a sweet, warm, adorable transgender story of love and romance. This is the story of a young trans woman whose boyfriend completely adores her. Now, she is to become a bride.

Drawn in an absurdly adorable chibi art style, with squashed, kawaii characters bubbling with life and colour, this is a celebration of love and transness.

This queer manga is an essential transgender story and trans manga for anyone who wants to see what a more positive, celebratory trans story can bring to the table. It’s funny; it’s sweet; it’s heartwarming.

The Bride was a Boy will have you singing and laughing and cheering for the sweet romance of a young trans woman and her doting future husband.

Buy a copy of The Bride Was a Boy

If you enjoyed this list of queer graphic novels and manga, please share with anyone you think would enjoy it.

A third way to read manga is by buying and using an eReader (a Kingle, Kobo, or Nook). Choosing the best eReader for manga can be a lot more time-consuming than you might expect, however (speaking from experience).

Luckily, I’ve done the work for you, and I’ve found what I believe to be the best eReader for manga.

Note: I’m aware that a lot of manga fans choose to read manga for free online. A lot of these are scans or fan translations. I don’t do this and I don’t advocate for it. I love manga and I love the work that translators do, so I support them with my money. You should, too.

Searching for the Best eReader for Manga

My own reasons for wanting to find the best eReader for manga include:

• Being someone who moves and travels often, so cannot afford to build a huge collection of physical manga volumes
• Always wanting to buy the newest manga and being tired of volumes selling out quickly and for long periods
• Having a single handy device that can store or access all my manga easily

Before finding the best eReader for manga, I owned a Kindle Paperwhite and then a Kindle Voyage. These are great for reading novels, but they are less than ideal for reading manga.

The reason for this is simple: their screens are too small. Kindle Paperwhites have a screen size of 6 inches, and even the larger Kindle Oasis has a screen size of 7 inches.

The average manga page, however, is roughly 9 inches in size. So, that was my main focus when searching for the best eReader for manga. I needed something that would feel like a full-size manga in my hands.

If I’m going to be buying and collecting manga digitally, I want my manga to feel as close to a physical tankobon volume as possible. That means having deep blacks, a high pixel count, maximum detail, and most importantly, a size that is comparable to a physical manga.

I should also state that I ruled out buying a tablet, opting to focus on finding the best eReader for manga instead.

My reason for this is mostly because tablets are a lot more expensive and I knew I wouldn’t get as much use out of it beyond reading manga. I have a phone and a MacBook Pro. I don’t need a tablet as well.

If you feel the same way, and you want to find the best eReader for manga, then I can’t recommend the Kobo Forma highly enough.

Why the Kobo Forma is the Best eReader for Manga

My long search came to an end when I found the Kobo Forma. In the months since I purchased one, I have been glued to it, reading more manga now than I ever have before.

Here’s why the Kobo Forma is the best eReader for manga.

Perfect Screen Size

As I already mentioned, the most important factor for me was the size of the display. Squinting at dialogue boxes and getting a headache, pinching to zoom in almost constantly, or simply having panels too small to appreciate the art. None of this is ideal.

The feeling of turning on your eReader, opening a manga, and having it look and feel like a physical manga volume is absolutely magical, and that’s what you get from the Kobo Forma.

The Kobo Forma has an 8 inch screen, making its screen size almost exactly the same as the average tankobon manga volume. The difference is so slight, in fact, as to be unnoticeable.

You’ll never find yourself needing to squint or to pinch and zoom. Just sit and enjoy. It’s bliss.

A range of Settings and Options

I’ll say up front that I’m no tech expert, but here are some of the settings and options that I have enjoyed with the Kobo Forma.

“Natural Light” is a setting that most phones and laptops have these days. It switches out the harsh blue glow of most screens for a warming yellow glow that is much healthier and easier for your eyes.

A lot of people turn this natural light setting on at night, before bed. I leave it on all the time, and my eyes thank me for it. The Kobo Forma having this is another blissful aspect of the device, and another reason why it’s the best eReader for manga.

“Rapid page turn” is a cool aspect of the Kobo Forma. When you hold down the page turn button, the eReader quickly cycles through pages as though you were thumbing through a physical book.

This is a satisfying and time-saving quirk of the Kobo Forma that I hugely appreciate.

“Auto rotate” is another awesome feature that’s particularly good for manga readers. So many manga wow their readers with periodical double-page spreads featuring gorgeous art. 

It might be a cityscape or a final blow in a shounen fight. Whatever it is, and whatever manga it’s in, the power of the double-page spread is impactful.

The Kobo Forma rotates automatically, allowing you to quickly flip it on its side and take in the full impact of that double-page spread. Then just rotate back and continue reading a page at a time.

Impressive Battery Life

I mentioned before having owned two Kindle devices before my Kobo Forma, and I was constantly surprised by the poor battery life.

I read a lot (reading is my main hobby and part of my job), so maybe I just read more than the average Kindle owner, but when Amazon promises two weeks of battery life and yet I’m worried about my Kindle dying during a long-haul flight, something is off.

The Kobo Forma has seriously impressed me with its battery life, which far exceeds those of my previous Kindle devices.

Manga does drain the battery faster than prose does, but that’s what makes the battery doubly impressive. The Kobo Forma, when used for nothing but manga, still lasts longer than my Kindles did when used for reading only text-based books.

The impressive battery life of the Kobo Forma is another important reason why it’s the best eReader for manga.

So Much Manga on the Kobo Store

One worry I had came from my lack of experience with Kobo devices. I had no idea if all my favourite manga — or manga I was excited to read — could be found on the Kobo Store.

Those worries were unfounded, though. I have rarely searched for a manga on the Kobo Store and come up empty handed. In fact, here are all the manga I was disappointed not to find on the Kobo Store: Kingdom, Planetes, Vagabond. That’s it.

As a big reader of shounen manga, shoujo, slice-of-life manga, and seinen manga, I was happy to find all the latest, and many classic, manga available on the Kobo Store.

Not only that, but it’s all wonderfully affordable. In the UK, VIP membership to the Kobo Store costs £6 per year, and this discounts almost every single volume of manga by 10%.

You also gain points for every purchase, which you can gather to eventually get yourself a free manga.

Ideal Visual Design

Every aspect of the Kobo Forma’s visual design is ideal for my reading tastes.

This eReader has a huge brightness adjuster, as well as the aforementioned natural light filter (which is also adjustable).

The Forma has a 300 ppi E-ink display, which makes the deepest blacks of your manga pop beautifully.

Then there’s the physical design: a rubbery back means it’s secure and comfortable to hold. The page-turn buttons are sturdy and easy to read with your thumb. It can also be flipped to hold with either hand.

And once again, the 8-inch screen size is the biggest selling point, mirroring the look and feel of a physical manga almost perfectly.

Conclusion

The Kobo Forma is the closest you can get to holding a physical tankobon manga volume in your hands, thanks to its 8-inch screen and 300 ppi E-ink display.

The natural light filter, adjustable brightness, and rapid page turn feature make for the perfect manga reading experience.

The battery life is far better than any Kindle I have ever personally owned, and the library of manga available on the Kobo Store is extremely extensive.

The Kobo Forma is the best eReader for manga on the market right now. Pick one up without hesitation if you’re a manga fan looking for the ultimate manga reading experience.

When you watch or read Jujutsu Kaisen, you’re experiencing something wholly new; something that wears its inspiration on its sleeve (we’ll get to that), but also uses fresh eyes to tell an original and groundbreaking shounen story.

If you’ve already watched the anime, should you also read Jujutsu Kaisen? Or, if you haven’t seen it, is the Jujutsu Kaisen manga the best place to start enjoying the series? Let’s dig into both of these questions. But first, what is Jujutsu Kaisen?

Read More: Why You Need to Read Beastars

What is Jujutsu Kaisen about?

Written and drawn by Gege Akutami, Jujutsu Kaisen is a shounen manga (and anime) series that blends the established tropes of shounen manga with horror elements — both physical and existential.

Set in a world identical to ours, with the exception of the series’ core concept of curses (monsters) and cursed energy, Jujutsu Kaisen begins with protagonist Yuji Itadori (there is also a “Chapter 0” pilot which we’ll get to below).

Itadori is an ordinary high-schooler with a lot of heart, a lack of direction, and above average physical speed and strength. Little else separates him from his classmates.

But Itadori is also a member of his school’s Occult Research Club, having joined because it allows him enough free time after school to visit his grandfather in hospital.

His grandfather’s dying words of advice — “Help people. It doesn’t have to be all the time. Just whenever you can. You may feel lost. Don’t expect gratitude. Just help them.” — become Yuji’s code of ethics.

Itadori’s connection to the Occult Research Club and his close relationship to death help to immediately establish the horror atmosphere of Jujutsu Kaisen, separating it from both its inspiration and its contemporaries (with exceptions like Attack on Titan, Demon Slayer, and The Promised Neverland).

In Chapter 1 of Jujutsu Kaisen, Itadori meets Megumi Fushiguro, who corners Itadori and asks him to hand over a talisman which the Occult Research Club stumbled upon. Fushiguro is a jujutsu sorcerer, and he explains to Itadori how curses, curse energy, and cursed objects work.

The talisman that Itadori found is a “special grade” cursed object: the finger of Sukuna, King of Curses. As a handful of curses are drawn to the school, Itadori helps Fushiguro fight them off.

When they find themselves outmatched, Itadori decides to swallow the finger in the hopes of obtaining some cursed energy. This self-risking, self-sacrificing attitude is what establishes Itadori as a reckless but lovable protagonist.

Itadori is now the host of Sukuna. This leads him to join Tokyo Jujutsu High as a student sorcerer. The school’s superiors plan to execute Itadori once he collects and consumes all twenty of Sukuna’s fingers, in order to exorcise the King of Curses once and for all.

This is how Jujutsu Kaisen begins. From here, we have the perfect setup for a horror-tinged shounen manga series.

At Tokyo Provincial Jujutsu High School, Itadori meets his fellow sorcerers, sets out on missions to exorcise curses, and searches for the fingers of Sukuna. All the while he learns, grows, and develops as a character and jujutsu sorcerer.

What makes the Jujutsu Kaisen manga so special?

It’s a weird thing to say but, when I read Jujutsu Kaisen, I feel a sense of pride. I’m proud of Gege Akutami. I’m proud of his vision, his dedication, his embracing of inspiration and genre, his ability to twist and invert ideas and expectations.

Jujutsu Kaisen is the next step in shounen manga. It represents a fresh new generation of the genre and style. It embraces tradition, treads comfortable ground, while also forging its own path forward.

Take the trope of good vs bad. In Jujutsu Kaisen, everything is grey. Curses are the bad guys, but they are born from human emotion and human behaviour.

Or the trope of too much exposition. As Geoff Thew of Mother’s Basement explained (far better than I can) in his video, Jujutsu Kaisen provides a canonical reason why characters wax on about their powers and abilities. It’s smart, meta, and fun.

Jujutsu Kaisen is also part of the wonderful trend in modern shounen of having a hefty injection of horror in its setting, themes, and tone. This is a blood-soaked series. It has hauntings and curses and exorcism. It depicts death in a visceral way, not like a revolving door.

Gege Akutami also wears his inspiration proudly. As Bonsai Pop covered in their video, Akutami was inspired by the works of Yoshihiro Togashi, creator of Yu Yu Hakusho and Hunter x Hunter, and also husband of Sailor Moon creator Naoko Takeuchi (this has nothing to do with anything, except that it’s awesome).

Togashi is a mangaka who loves to invert expectations and twist the tropes of genre. Akutami does the same with Jujutsu Kaisen, keeping things at once recognisable and wholly, repeatedly, creative and surprising.

Why should you read Jujutsu Kaisen?

If this summary of how Jujutsu Kaisen begins has you intrigued, you’re probably now wondering if you should watch or read Jujutsu Kaisen.

As I said at the beginning, there are two types of people who want to read Jujutsu Kaisen: fans of the anime and newbies who haven’t watched or read Jujutsu Kaisen yet.

For fans of the anime

For fans of the anime, the benefits of reading the Jujutsu Kaisen manga are obvious. The biggest benefit is that the manga is far ahead of the anime. Season 1 of Jujutsu Kaisen ends on Chapter 63, and there is a lot of manga to enjoy beyond that point.

The Jujutsu Kaisen movie will adapt Chapter 0 and serve as a prequel, but that was originally the pilot of the Jujutsu Kaisen manga and is also readily available for you to read right now. In fact, it will probably be the first thing you see if you choose to read Jujutsu Kaisen.

If you choose to read Jujutsu Kaisen physically, or on an eReader, Chapter 0 exists as its own tankobon volume, and details events prior to Itadori joining Tokyo Jujutsu High.

Jujutsu Kaisen 0 introduces supporting characters Satoru Gojo, Maki Zenin, Toge Inumaki, and Panda through the eyes of Yuta Okkotsu (who is never seen and only mentioned in the main series). In Chapter 0, Maki, Inumaki, and Panda are first years and this chapter is set one year prior to our introduction to Itadori Yuji as main protagonist.

Chapter 0 is set across four chapters, and focuses on Okkotsu’s curse. As a kid, he was crushed on hard by a young girl who died suddenly. He is now haunted by her curse, which manifests to defend him whenever he is in danger (kind of like a stand in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure).

Okkotsu’s curse is special grade and, therefore, very dangerous. He is enrolled by Satoru Gojo into Tokyo Provincial Jujutsu High School and, from there, we meet future second years Panda, Maki, and Inumaki.

This prequel also introduces a villain who was once a Jujutsu High School student but who is now on a world domination kick, believing ordinary people to be monkeys, beneath Jujutsu sorcerers on the evolutionary ladder. He hopes to purify the world and eradicate those who take up space.

Geto is nothing we haven’t seen before in shounen manga and anime; he’s not a fresh idea. But he does serve as a suitably tantalising villain to begin the series with.

Jujutsu Kainsen Manga vs Anime

Fans of the anime are probably also wondering about how it compares to the Jujutsu Kaisen manga. Well, the anime of Jujutsu Kaisen is shockingly faithful to its manga source material. It does an exceptional job of carrying everything over, even down to the background details that sometimes get glossed over by anime adaptations.

The anime is also gorgeous, both in art and animation. It is stunning to look at, featuring some of the most well-animated fight scenes in anime history. The Jujutsu Kaisen manga, however, also excels in this department.

Watching the actions scenes of Jujutsu Kaisen unfold in the manga is its own kind of beautiful. Gege Akutami is an exceptional artist who uses dynamic shot composition, expressive characterisation, and imaginative depictions of magic and combat to bring so much texture and electricity to his panels.

The design of Jujutsu Kaisen is a wonder to behold. And while, as I said, the anime does a stellar job of translating this to screen and colour, the manga is where it started, and Gege Akutami’s art deserves your love and admiration.

If you’re already a huge fan of the anime, you need to read Jujutsu Kaisen just to see the art, design, and plotting of this stunning series as it was originally done by its sole creator. The mind and hand of Gege Akutami are truly exceptional things.

For new fans of Jujutsu Kaisen

If you’re a new or prospective fan of the series, the biggest reason to read Jujutsu Kaisen is that you get to start at Chapter 0. As I already said, this was the manga’s pilot, so it’s where every new reader should begin.

Fans of the anime (who haven’t read the manga) will know nothing about the events of Chapter 0, until it’s covered in the Jujutsu Kaisen movie. If you start with the manga, you start with Chapter 0 and move on from there.

If you choose to read Jujutsu Kaisen, you can also enjoy it uninterrupted. You have no anime to compare it to, no pauses, no need to wait. You can just start reading and enjoy it from beginning to end (well, not quite — at the time of writing, the Jujutsu Kaisen manga isn’t finished. It is, however, currently around three anime seasons long).

I’ve already pointed out how gorgeous Gege Akutami’s art is, so you’re not losing anything by starting with the manga. You can also then turn to the anime to see how MAPPA broughtJujutsu Kaisen to life with stunning animation.

Buy a copy of Jujutsu Kaisen Chapter 0 here!

The Pear Field is a novel of juxtapositions. It is full of tragedy, but written with a calm joviality. It has a gothic tone but is populated by lovable characters, rather than ones you love to hate. It shocks and frightens you at one turn while filling you with hope and laughter at another. It is as changeable as its characters and the lives they lead.

Written by award-winning Georgian film director Nana Ekvtimishvili, The Pear Field is a debut novel full of intimacy and grief. The translation by Elizabeth Heighway provides as many paradoxes as the novel itself does, playing with rhythm and flow in ways that leave the reader feeling like they’ve suffered whiplash.

Set at the edge of Georgia’s capital city, The Pear Field tells the story of Lela, an eighteen-year-old girl who has had to grow up far too quickly. With little-to-no knowledge of her origins, Lela has spent her life so far at Tbilisi’s Residential School for Intellectually Disabled Children.

As Lela points out, however, this school is as much a place for parents to dump unwanted children as anything else. Half of the children at the school do require educational support, while the other half are simply ordinary cast-offs. Those who escape and go on to live any kind of success at all, Lela refers to them as the Heroes of Kerch Street.

Having seen so much pain and lived with so much frustration, disappointment, and helplessness, Lela has a responsibility to do right by the younger ones. Though she is eighteen, she has remained at the school in a big sister capacity. Soon enough, she latches herself onto a boy named Irakli.

Irakli has been abandoned by his mother, though he doesn’t understand this. To make matters worse, whenever he calls her, his mother picks up the phone and lies to him. She is always searching for work, waiting to get paid, trying to get back to him. Lela, of course, sees through it, and it eats her up to see this boy continue to have hope.

When a woman visits the school on behalf of an American couple looking to adopt a child, Lela puts Irakli in her path, refusing to stop until she has pulled enough levers to alter his route and put Irakli on the road to a better life.

The Pear Field is a novel of nine chapters which can be roughly divided into three acts of three chapters apiece. In the first act, we come to know Lela and the school. We see her unpleasant and pitiable sexual growth, her hardened skin, her scrappy survivalist mentality. In the second act, we see her fight for Irakli. Finally, in act three, the story juggles Irakli’s path forward with Lela’s own hunt for vengeance.

As the blurb says, Lela has vowed to kill her history teacher, and this isn’t some hollow promise. It’s a thematic and narrative driving force in The Pear Field, and one which clashes with her good nature more and more as the novel progresses.

Lela herself is an infinitely lovable protagonist. A survivor of trauma and tragedy, most of which is still not over, she is a character to feel great sorrow and sympathy for. But her gritted-teeth positivity prevents us from ever viewing her as a victim.

Lela is someone to respect and admire far more than she is someone to pity. She blends stoicism with pain and hope. She is a case study for taking rotten lemons and making halfway-decent lemonade.

Where the sorrow of the novel really comes in is with Irakli. As Lela watches his hopeful flame flicker, so do we, but we all also see his mother’s lies and we instinctively want to cry for him. Unlike we helpless readers, however, Lela is going to do something for Irakli. She’s going to save him.

The Pear Field has a claustrophobic gothic setting without the trappings. While it should feel akin to Rebecca or Wuthering Heights with its high walls, small setting, hateful villains, and narrow focus, that juxtaposition of hopeful, funny characters blows away the gothic fog and reveals a much calmer, more entertaining ride.

Even as tragedy strikes and blood is drawn, there is still this sense that things will turn out all right. But the gothic touch is there in the shape of a sword hanging over everything. At any moment, things could go wrong; the glass will shatter, and everyone’s hopes along with it.

Conclusion

The Pear Field is a flawless novel that moves forward so effortlessly on the strength of its characters, especially the lovable, hopeful, angry Lela. A tortured, doomed hero, she is a light that guides us through the trauma and tragedy of this novel.

Blending gothic settings, themes, and tone with a grounded, earthy sense of realism, The Pear Field has bite. But it also knows when to crack a joke. It shows us how unwavering the mind of a child can be, for good and for ill. It gives us hope, snatches it away, then offers it once more, promising that it won’t be cruel this time.

What we have here are three Kobo Abe novels, published in succession over ten years (from 1967 to 1977): The Ruined Map, The Box Man, and Secret Rendezvous.

All are relatively short novels and each one has elements of the Kafkaesque in its DNA. All are surrealist novels, though they differ wildly in the absurdism (with The Ruined Map being the most lucid and The Box Man the most abstract).

Fair warning: these three novels do not represent all of Abe’s works. His most famous novel – The Woman in the Dunes – is missing from this list, in part because it has a problematic and upsetting approach to writing women and sex. Though all of Abe’s novels take a raw approach to sex, that one is by far the most problematic.

However, despite this not being Abe’s complete body of work, they do beautifully represent a clear progression in style and theme for their author. Reading them in publication order is illuminating, and reading them out of order is chaotic in both a fun and a frustrating manner.

So, if you’re looking to explore the world and writings of the surrealist and Kafkaesque Kobo Abe, these three books offer the perfect place to start.

The Ruined Map

Translate by E. Dale Saunders

Of the three Kobo Abe novels discussed here, The Ruined Map is the longest, clearest, and most accessible.

Disguised as a straightforward piece of genre fiction — specifically, a pulp noir detective novel — it steadily allows Kobo Abe’s signature surrealism to seep in through the cracks bit by bit, but never truly overwhelm the reader in the way that The Box Man does.

At a little over 200 pages long, The Ruined Map is only slightly longer than The Secret Rendezvous, but it probably takes less time to read due to its clearer, more traditional, less absurdist approach to writing. It’s a testament to E. Dale Saunders’ translation prowess that they were able to translate both The Box Man and The Ruined Map (two novels so distinct from one another in terms of narrative and structure) so wonderfully.

The Ruined Map begins in a straightforward manner, with a detective – our protagonist – arriving at the home of a woman who has hired him to help her find her missing husband.

Though, if this isn’t your first Kobo Abe book, you’ll already be aware of some of his trappings here. Namely, the fact that he spends an ungodly amount of time on minor, insignificant descriptions, while character interactions come off as circular and like they are treading water. It’s surrealism but in a subtle, almost invisible kind of way.

This reserved approach to surrealism perhaps demonstrates how Abe’s writing evolved over time. Of these three novels, The Ruined Map was the first to be published, followed by The Box Man, which is surrealism unfettered and gloves off.

Secret Rendezvous is arguably the smartest and strongest of the three, balancing absurdism with genuinely smart Kafkaesque themes; it only makes sense that this was the result of Kobo Abe honing his skills as a writer and literary philosopher.

As for the story, we follow our detective protagonist as he attempts to find this missing husband. The man was in his thirties and working a desperately dull job (very similar to the protagonist of Secret Rendezvous). One day, he up and vanished, with his wife waiting six months to hire a PI to track him down. When asked why, she blames her brother who urged her to be patient. The brother is called upon next.

The wife, by our detectives own deductions, is a borderline alcoholic who comes across jumpy, unsure of herself, and pathetically meek. She is unhelpful, offering the detective clues which don’t seem like clues at all.

Her brother is more clear-cut as a character but also more manipulative and playful with the truth. Neither are particularly helpful, and it’s from here that our protagonist must descend into more dangerous territory in his search for the missing man.

While The Ruined Map does come across as a pulp detective story, this is all just window dressing. Though that window dressing does make for a far more accessible novel for first-time readers of Kobo Abe’s works. The real meat of the story comes from its execution and how Abe, still in his early writing years, is beginning to play with surrealism as a narrative and world-building mechanic.

As mentioned before, the surrealism is drip-fed through the writing style of the novel. The story and mystery remain ever intact but the riddle-talking characters, the feeling of running on the spot. The obsessive and overly detailed descriptions of ordinary, unrelated things is loudly reminiscent of Twin Peaks. So much of what makes this novel surreal applies to David Lynch’s masterpiece.

And so, I’ll say this right now: any fan of Twin Peaks would likely adore this novel. Its missing person setup, detective protagonist, obsession with mundane detail, and off-kilter world populated by unsettling and sometimes dangerous characters has an intense Lynchian feel to it. I can’t help but wonder if Lynch was inspired by Kobo Abe’s writing. It seems impossible that he wasn’t.

Kafka’s influence can still be felt in this novel’s themes and execution as well. The titular ruined map can be applied to the Tokyo our detective explores, as well as the mental map he is forming from the clues that he follows. Perhaps most importantly, the fact that the map is ruined feels emblematic of the book’s strongest theme: that we can never truly know one another.

The circular behaviour of the conversations in this book, the concept of a ruined map, and the endless searching that our detective engages in – it is all emblematic of an issue with personal relationships. Secret Rendezvous and The Box Man both dwell on this concept as well.

It seems that Abe had an issue with knowing, understanding, and even trusting our fellow man, and he chose to express this paranoia and frustration through Kafkaesque surrealism. It is a question many of us have considered: how can we ever actually know one another? We only know what our senses tell us. We rely on observing habits and trends to form predictions.

When we say “I know you” to someone, we only mean that we know their habits and their typical behavioural loop. We know them by sight, sound, maybe smell. But what does it mean to know someone? And if we can’t, how do we trust them?

This question is everywhere in Abe’s writing, and seen just as strongly here, though it is far less forceful, abstract, and aggressive. That’s what makes this loose piece of genre fiction much more accessible. Ultimately, it’s a superb place to start reading Kobo Abe as you become accustomed to his themes, ideas, philosophy, behaviour, and style.

Buy a copy of The Ruined Map here!

The Box Man

Translated by E. Dale Saunders

At 155 pages, The Box Man is a short yet incredibly dense novel – the kind which takes as long to read as a more straightforward 400-page book might. Its density is due to the intense and dizzying surrealism which frames its narrative.

The Box Man is intentionally hard to follow, feeling at times like a labyrinth. It can make the reader feel physically exhausted as they attempt to keep track of its events and characters, but the reward for persevering is considerable and satisfying.

The Box Man is set in a Japan where it seems not uncommon for men to abandon their ordinary lives, swapping their homes for cardboard boxes. They occupy these boxes like hermit crabs, writing notes and scrawling on the insides of their boxes.

Our protagonist is a box man who writes in shifting perspectives. It quickly becomes hard to tell when he is describing himself or someone else, or even when he is being described by a secondary narrator.

Our nameless box man has been living outside of the bounds of society for a hazy amount of time, and he begins his narrative by describing the ideal box for a box man, recounting dreams, and giving an example of how one might become a box man.

When he is offered an impressive sum of money to discard his box in the ocean, he decides to follow the woman who made the offer – a nurse – back to the hospital. It’s at this point that the novel’s narrative becomes almost impossibly tangled.

While The Box Man quickly enough drags its reader down into a frightening mire of twisted narratives, distorted places, fractured sequences of time, and multiple narrators, it never loses its keen eye for exploring big themes and ideas. It’s these themes which save The Box Man from being a jumbled, incomprehensible mess.

Like many of Kobo Abe’s works, The Box Man is a Kafkaesque work (in fact, the writer is often considered Japan’s answer to Franz Kafka), but this novel is only loosely Kafkaesque. It is also a novel inspired by socialist ideals, anarchistic dreams, and surrealism.

Our protagonist wishes to live outside of society, mesmerised by the allure of being a human hermit crab. He wishes to free himself of the very concept of identity, offering the reader the perspective that identity is a social construct that can be removed and discarded like an old jacket.

At the novel’s outset, the metaphor of the box man is clear enough, and we get to see the pros and cons of discarding one’s identity.

Abe explores whether or not this is even possible, and asks us to ponder what it might even look like to live outside of society, especially when his protagonist remains living in a city, using money, scavenging human artefacts, and bartering with other people.

It’s clear that Kobo Abe is intrigued by what his box man represents, but that he also sees the hypocrisy in it. And that hypocrisy is perhaps the novel’s greatest strength.

Hypocrisies, arguments, parallels, and paradoxes abound in The Box Man as Abe seems to spend the novel fighting against his own ideas and ideals. His protagonist is neither good nor bad but acts as a vessel for his own musings and frustrations.

Our titular box man is a fairly reprehensible person, especially when it comes to women. Before abandoning his ordinary life, he was a photographer — by his own definition, a ‘voyeur’.

In one chapter, after becoming sexually obsessed with the nurse he pursues, the box man even lucidly ponders whether or not he became a box man only to continue his perverted hobby of voyeurism, now from a vantage point of increased anonymity and, thus, power.

The elephant in the room here is that Abe has a track record of writing women badly. While I haven’t read his most famous work, The Woman in the Dunes, it has been criticised for its rape scene and its tool-like use of a woman as a plot device.

This kind of writing, whether it serves a purpose or not, is inexcusable. It’s tiresome, frustrating, and aggravating, and I won’t make any apologies for Kobo Abe writing women as tools rather than characters. This problematic approach to women rears its ugly head in The Box Man as well, though it is arguably far less clear-cut.

While his main woman character (the nurse) is nothing more than an object of sexual desire for the box man and his counterpart (the doctor-cum-imitation box man), she does seem to represent a bigger thematic point. With the box man being a perverted voyeur, it could be argued that Kobo Abe is using him and the nurse to attack the toxicity of masculinity.

This could easily be me giving a writer the benefit of the doubt, as well as me projecting more modern considerations on a long-dead writer, but the depiction of the titular box man as a repulsive, dangerous, pathetic character is hard to ignore. Entitlement, fetishism, immaturity — it’s all here in full view.

Looking at the box man’s obsession with the nurse – the ways in which he fetishises, watches, fantasises over her – combined with the fact that he is a delusional, broken man living in a cardboard box, it all stinks of what we today refer to as incel behaviour.

The box man is a lonely, delusional loser, living in denial, behaving like a man-child, acting dangerously, lying to both himself and the reader. It doesn’t seem to be much of a stretch to view Abe’s box man as a sad, pathetic representation of the modern toxic man.

This is backed up by his own unreliable narration, his clinically dry, overly scientific way of seeing and writing about the world, and his twisted, hypocritical, paradoxical way of describing the world and the people around him. The box man seems to think that he is free, that he is smarter than everyone else, and yet he is ultimately a lonely, confused pervert in a cardboard box.

None of this excuses Abe’s poor characterisation of his woman character, but it is aided by the only other depiction of a woman in the novel. In one of the final chapters of The Box Man, a young boy watches a piano teacher in the bathroom. He is another voyeuristic pervert.

This time, however, he is shamed by the woman and punished by being forced to experience that same vulnerability. This adds credence to the idea that Kobo Abe is shaming men for their sense of entitlement; their false, unearned superiority; their perverted, shameless behaviour.

Given just how surreal The Box Man is, it is easy enough for every reader to find an entirely unique interpretation of its story, characters, and themes. This is just my interpretation. But, from where I’m standing, The Box Man seems to be a clear enough condemnation of toxic male behaviour.

After all, his perverted, unreliable, hypocritical narrator spends his days writing notes while living inside a cardboard box, naively believing himself free of the shackles of society.

Buy a copy of The Box Man here!

Secret Rendezvous

Translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter

Of all of Kobo Abe’s novels, Secret Rendezvous is the one which so many inspired works can be traced back to. Similarly, it is the one most obviously inspired by the man Abe is so often compared to: Franz Kafka.

Reading Secret Rendezvous, it is immediately apparent how much of Abe’s stylistic and thematic DNA is shared with Haruki Murakami, with Murakami so often writing about lost women and the frightened, overwhelmed men who search for them.

Secret Rendezvous also revels in that quaint Murakami absurdism: a narrator from a bland, ordinary life is thrust into an impossible, absurd world and yet so admirably adapts and takes it all on the chin. The novel’s narration is split in two, with our protagonist in the present recounting his recent past experiences.

The past, written in the third person, takes up the bulk of the story, but the present framing device also moves forward gently, with the two edging closer as the gap between them shrinks.

Our nameless protagonist is a man searching for his wife. At the outset of the novel, an ambulance arrives at their house in the middle of the night to take her away, despite her being perfectly healthy and nobody having called for an ambulance.

She is immediately stolen away and our man gives chase, arriving at an endless, labyrinthine hospital. It’s the stuff of nightmares, with the hospital setting constantly growing and shifting. As Secret Rendezvous progresses, the hospital bloats so much as to be described (rather nonchalantly) by the narrator as having valleys.

As our protagonist searches for his wife, he meets a cast of anonymous characters, many of whom talk in riddles, take on multiple roles, behave as both doctors and patients. They give him tasks, offer him a job and a room, and our man’s main point of contact believes (or hopes) himself to be a horse.

However long our protagonist spends searching for his wife, he makes no progress. Soon after arriving, he discovers that she was being held in a small room with no exit, and yet somehow she has vanished. Scenarios like this increase in frequency and absurdity as time goes by. How much time is unclear, with the hours and minutes following as few rules as the space and architecture of the hospital itself.

It’s evident just how inspired Murakami must have been by the works of Kobo Abe, and Secret Rendezvous in particular. So much of the tone, characters, and events of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle can be found in the architecture of Secret Rendezvous.

Beyond Murakami, there are clear links between the genetics of this novel and The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada.

While her novel is intensely Kafkaesque with its aggressive and exhausted take on bureaucracy and work culture, its depiction of the endless, all-consuming physical world of the factory is so tangibly reminiscent of the hospital Abe describes in this novel.

Speaking of Franz Kafka, it’s no secret that Kobo Abe was heavily inspired by the Bohemian writer.

He even once visited Kafka’s home in Prague. But more than any other Abe novel, it’s Secret Rendezvous which feels like a direct homage to Kafka, not just a novel inspired by him.

The setting, characters, and themes of Secret Rendezvous read like a perfect blend of Kafka’s two novels: The Trial and The Castle. In The Trial, Josef K. is arrested for a crime he didn’t commit and doesn’t understand. He desperately seeks answers and finds nothing, only growing in desperation and confusion. In The Castle, K arrives at a village and attempts to gain access to the castle, only to be denied entry.

Elements of both novels can be found in Secret Rendezvous, with our protagonist clueless as to why his wife was taken (similar to The Trial) and unable to gain access to her (like in The Castle). Beyond its inspirations and the mark it left on Japan’s literary world, Secret Rendezvous is a masterpiece in its own right.

It isn’t only the gross, monstrous hospital setting — ever growing, changing, remaining unknowable and all-consuming — which exists to terrify and alienate both the reader and the protagonist, but also the people who populate it.

Like the characters in a Silent Hill game or a Sarah Kane play, the people our protagonists meets, seeks help from, and must come to rely on (despite their riddle talk and impossible behaviour) are distracting, untrustworthy, and demanding.

Some of them have two or more jobs within the hospital and some seem to be both doctors and patients. One is a horse.

There is genuine horror in this novel’s absurdism, and what makes it all the more unnerving is how our protagonist seems to be keeping his head above water the entire time, almost as though he is becoming accustomed to the world of the hospital and those who populate it, especially once he is given a role of his own to play.

It’s here that Abe’s love for the theatre becomes most evident (it’s not hard to imagine an Artaud stage adaptation of this novel). Beyond the roles these characters play, there’s also Abe’s patented use of raw sexualisation.

Though, while The Box Man and Woman in the Dunes explicitly sexualised the female form, Secret Rendezvous has fun with exploring male genitals and masturbation. This time around the purpose seems to be blurring the lines between sexual pleasure, clinical examination, and physical pain.

That clinical behaviour extends to Abe’s tone and writing style as well. It has been remarked upon by other writers how Abe has a scientific approach to writing, with his characters maintaining a clear-headed, logical approach to the events of their own stories, however surreal and absurd they may be.

This helps add to the unsettling nature of Secret Rendezvous as our protagonist keeps an impossibly level head no matter what new wall is raised in front of him. While Secret Rendezvous is so explicitly inspired by – and even reads like an homage to – the works of Franz Kafka, it also takes on a life of its own and has its own unique themes to explore.

Kafka was intensely obsessed with the paralysing, confusing, alienating, inhuman bureaucracy of post-industrial Western life. Secret Rendezvous, on the other hand, is more concerned with how our jobs, our roles, our relationships, and even our places of working and living seem to mould and shape us into ugly, unknowable, unhelpful things.

Alienation is still a key Kafkaesque theme here, but it’s what causes that alienation and what it leads to that makes Abe’s novel uniquely its own piece of art.

Buy a copy of Secret Rendezvous here!

Inio Asano is a mangaka best known for being one of the manga world’s smartest and boldest creators. His series Goodnight Punpun is an oft-touted masterpiece that taps into the tragedy of growing up lost and frightened.

It’s a series that represents the literary highs which manga can (and often does) achieve. But if you want a self-contained example of the genius of Inio Asano, might I suggest the raw, erotic, desperately sorrowful A Girl on the Shore (Umibe no Onnanoko).

Published in a single dense volume that can be enjoyed in an afternoon, and spread across twenty chapters which sometimes hop, sometimes leap forward in time. A Girl on the Shore follows the rocky, immature, sexually charged relationship of two Japanese middle-schoolers living in a sad, ugly nowhere town.

While the book’s blurb is tragically written and is guaranteed to trigger a cringe response from anyone who reads it, the content of A Girl on the Shore — both its writing and its art — is second to none, especially within the context of gloomy teen drama and explicit sexual experimentation.

Our protagonists are Koume and Isobe, neither yet sixteen years of age but both already chewing their nails in sexual anticipation. Koume has briefly involved herself with the local cool guy, who quickly used her for fun and games.

Meanwhile, Isobe is explicitly written as a lonely, isolated, awkward otaku loser; an incel in the making. Though also far from it given the nature of his and Koume’s relationship. While the manga does have other background characters, they offer little more than window dressing and the world of this book would work just as well if it was populated only by Koume and Isobe.

Every other character exists as a thing against which our protagonists can react, which they often do. They antagonise, threaten, manipulate, and even brawl with our protagonists. As for Koume and Isobe themselves, they are two of the most relatable, representative teenagers you’re ever likely to come across in book, manga or otherwise.

Their story begins with Isobe having admitted his feelings for Koume, and her brushing him off while still being comfortable enough to sleep with him. At the beginning, their relationship is defined by their sex, which is depicted with graphic intensity through Asano’s art.

While they have nothing in common and their attraction towards each other is lopsided, their sexual encounters happen often, even at school. The fact that they are so young, and that Asano draws their sexual encounters with such intense and raw detail, is immediately awkward and there is a sense of shame that comes with reading it. But this is all done intentionally.

This is what awkward teenagers are like: horny, nervous, irresponsible, experimental, careless, angry, risk-takers and mistake-makers.

The sex is the first, and perhaps most, humanising thing about these characters. Both of them are crooked, lonely, awkward, messy, hyperbolic teenagers but they come alive in a sense during the moments of pleasure they spend together.

This is partly why Asano draws their sex in such detail; it reads like the book’s version of a shounen manga’s fight scenes, full of noise and intensity and detail and drama and sweat and anger. Beyond this, what is also so humanising about these characters is their frantic, frightening, confusing shifts in personality.

Despite being trapped in an ugly, static seaside town, the protagonists of A Girl on the Shore are like thunderstorms, changing quickly and growing darker before suddenly calming down and fading into peace. They change their minds, speak in clumsy, ridiculous hyperbole, grow angry for no sane reason, ask unreasonable questions and give absurd answers. They are teenagers, faultlessly represented and richly explored.

While A Girl on the Shore has two protagonists, Isobe is more of a fleshed-out character than Koume. He is a frightened, vulnerable, angry boy. His house is almost completely empty, with his father working away often and behaving in a carefree, hedonistic, uncaring manner when he does show up.

And the crux of his character is that Isobe’s older brother – his friend and role model – is dead. As the book goes on, Isobe’s hair grows out to match his brother’s and we learn that he is carrying on a blog which his brother used to write.

There is an intense tragedy to Isobe’s character, underplayed and argued with by the fact that he leans into this tragedy so dramatically and hyperbolically, just as teenagers tend to do.

All tenagers have baggage; all teenagers feel afraid and alone; all teenagers are damaged; and all teenagers react to this in an absurd, over-the-top way that often makes them hard to sympathise with. Their trauma may be real but the way they process it is often ridiculous. This is Isobe to a tee, and it is remarkable writing on Asano’s part.

The Art of Inio Asano

Beyond just the writing, what makes A Girl on the Shore such an irresistible page-turner is Asano’s astonishing artwork. His literary flair aside, Inio Asano is one of the great manga artists of our time. And A Girl on the Shore is a single collection of perfect Asano artwork.

His characters are full of so much minor, subtle expression, even when pulling blank faces. He is a master at expressing emotion through body language despite there being no animation. The shift from panel to panel carries tremendous weight thanks to how his characters’ bodies move and hang and drag themselves around.

And then there is the background and environmental design. There are more than a handful of panels – some small, some full double-page spreads – which you might mistake for black-and-white photographs. Asano’s detail when drawing trees, bushes, and grass is absurd, made even more unbelievable by his manipulation and understanding of light and shadow.

There is truly nobody like him when it comes to lighting effects. When it comes to light, Inio Asano does for manga what Makoto Shinkai does for anime.

A Girl on the Shore isn’t talked about often enough and, when it is, it’s usually to remark on the manga’s explicit sexual nature. The truth is that, when you read it from cover to cover, all of that sexual detail, in context, reads as nothing but awkward, tragic, angry fucking.

Once again, Asano understands the teenage mind. It seems he remembers how quickly a teenage boy falls into a pit of depression and self-loathing and depression, only to grow horny and claw his way out in search of porn or someone to screw.

This manga has a few failings in its writing, a few awkward blips, but it is more-or-less a masterpiece of mental health depiction, of unparalleled manga art, and of sharp character writing. The translation by Jocelyne Allen is also astonishing, playful and weighted from beginning to end.

A Girl on the Shore is such a raw and angry book, uncomfortable to read for many reasons. The strongest reason being just how frustratingly relatable it will be for so many people who remember what it was like to be a dramatic, sad, frightened, lonely, horny, confused teenager, taking risks and making mistakes.

Buy a copy of A Girl on the Shore here!

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is a subtly fantastical story, driven by themes of love, loss, and grief. It toes the line between YA and literary fiction, and it does so effortlessly.

Set during the shift from 80s to 90s Tokyo, as Japan’s great economic bubble is getting ready to burst, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida traces the lives of a handful of lovable but flawed young women and men. The titular Miwako Sumida is the axel around which this wheel of complex characters spins, each one taking a turn to narrate the story and impress upon us the kind of person Miwako Sumida was.

Sumida herself is dead. While working at a mountain retreat, she took a ladder into the forest and hanged herself from a large tree. Our three protagonists – Ryusei, Chie, and Fumi – are left to pick up the pieces of their own lives, recently shattered by the death of their friend.

Miwako Sumida was a student at Waseda University. Self-assured, thick-skinned, and consciously distant from other people, she only had one true friend: Chie. Less than a year before her death, however, Miwako met Ryusei, a lovestruck young man who becomes a dear friend to Miwako, while remaining hopeful for more.

Ryusei’s older sister, Fumi, is the owner of an art studio; she takes Miwako under her wing for a time before Miwako eventually leaves Tokyo behind.

Split into three parts, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is a three-dimensional story that moves seamlessly from the distant past to the recent past to the present, painting a colourful image of Miwako Sumida that grows in detail as the story gains momentum.

Despite not having been written by a Japanese novelist, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida strongly and elegantly echoes (as I’ve already mentioned) the style and tone of manga like Erased and Orange, and most vividly the novels of Haruki Murakami.

Goenawan here stitches just a few supernatural threads into the fabric of her novel; threads which don’t show until the final third of the novel. It’s this supernatural tinge, blended with the book’s settings — both time and place — and its emphasis on messy love and intense grief, which so delightfully calls to mind that distinct Murakami style.

The remote mountaintop village and its surrounding forest; the young hopeless romantic protagonist; the damaged but confident young woman; those ghostly, supernatural threads; the importance placed on a cat and its disappearance — Goenawan is having a lot of fun playing Murakami bingo with her story and characters and, reader, I am here for it.

It’s clear that Goenawan has a deep affection for Tokyo life, and for Japanese art and literature. But this is also far from a derivative novel. The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida stands tall and strong all on its own. Goenawan cements her own style here, most notably through her clever use of perspective.

Goenawan’s protagonists are each at the centre of their own story. In their parts, they command the story; they guide the reader’s eye. Their story is about them, and we begin to root for them. The best example is Ryusei, a young man suffering from unrequited love. We can’t help but want to root for him.

Yet, knowing from the first page that Sumida is dead, we know that rooting for him is a waste of energy and investment. Instead, we hope for him to work through his loss and his grief. We also come to realise that, despite being gone, Sumida is the star of our story. She doesn’t narrate it, but it’s all about her.

At a certain point, we come to see that it’s foolish to so blindly hope for Ryusei to get what he so craves; so often in romance stories we forget that both parties have agency. We get so wrapped up in one side that we overlook the other. But Miwako Sumida will not be overlooked.

In this quietly feminist sense, this almost reads as a rebellion against the Murakami industry. The author whom The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida most reflects is, famously, far from good at writing women characters. This novel feels like Goenawan’s attempt to fix that issue. She has created a Murakami-inspired novel that does away with all of his problems and tells a story far more rounded, pleasing, and sophisticated.

It doesn’t stop here, either. In The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida, Goenawan has attempted to write a layered and prominent trans character. One whose transness isn’t their defining characteristic, and whose own story doesn’t end in tragedy.

I’m not in a position to say whether or not Goenawan’s trans representation is flawless; in fact, it’s very possible that trans women and men might read this novel and take issue with its depiction of a trans woman. It’s also possible that they won’t. Speaking only as a non-binary reader, I enjoyed the inclusion of a trans character. More importantly, I loved the trans character’s story more than that of any other character in the novel.

Conclusion

In fewer than 300 pages, Clarissa Goenawan gives so much love, attention, and dimension to a handful of flawed and lovable young characters. We are offered so much crisp and fluid dialogue; so many detailed and eye-opening flashbacks and childhood stories. There are intense twists and turns, some you may see coming and some you won’t.

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is an exciting read while also being a chill and smooth one. It is rocked by death and grief and regret. There are mysteries that tease at you and lies you’ll be told, all in service of a complex, intense story that ebbs and flows so beautifully. It’s a wild ride, and a delightfully satisfying one.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s original Before the Coffee Gets Cold, an adaptation of his own stage play, was one of the best-selling novels of 2019. A sweet, goofy, novel with heart to spare. We called it “unapologetically awkward and campy, but it is full of soul, presented through clever world building and unfolding of its characters and relationships. A truly memorable and captivating reading experience.”

Now, in 2020, we get Tales from the Cafe, a follow-up to that sweet and sorrowful Japanese novel.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold was a collection of four interwoven stories, all set in a single Tokyo cafe. In this unassuming cafe there exists an unassuming table and chair, in which sits the not-so-unassuming ghost of a woman. Once a day, she will leave her seat and visit the bathroom. In that short window, a customer may choose to take her seat and use it to travel back in time; there, they can remain until the coffee gets cold.

Tales from the Cafe follows this exact same conceit, even down to the same four-act structure. The concept of a cafe corner which sends people back in time is a bottomless well of narrative ideas, and Kawaguchi does a wonderful job of continuing to plunge its depths.

Tales from the Cafe is exactly as sweet, as strong, as playful, sorrowful, touching, and awkward as Before the Coffee Gets Cold was. In this follow-up novel, we return to the cafe and those who work there. We follow closely the life of Kazu, the cafe waitress with the sole power of sending customers back in time as she pours their coffee.

Each story focuses on a customer who is looking for something. They have a sob story, something they’re searching for or an end to an unfinished narrative. But Kazu is always there, and her own story is gently told as the acts flow into one another.

Just as in the first novel, customers visit the cafe now and again, having heard the rumours of the time-travel chair. The first — and strongest — story in the book follows Gotaro, a man whose best friend died decades back. After his death, Gotaro raised the daughter he left behind.

Now, that daughter is getting married. She has no memory of her real dad and doesn’t even know that Gotaro isn’t her father. Gotaro’s guilt has reached breaking point, and he wants to record a message from his dead friend for her to watch on her wedding day.

This first story, The Best Friend, has all the makings of a real tearjerker, with Gotaro being a sweet, sensitive soul who only wants what he believes to be best for his daughter. And, despite having raised her well, has never felt like he ever was what’s best for her.

In this story, like in the first act of the original novel, we’re being introduced to the cafe’s workers as background noise. But, from here, they become far more central to the story. So, Tales from the Cafe is more of the same, to a point. It continues to ask the question: what kind of person would want to travel back in time for a handful of minutes, and why?

It’s an engaging premise, and just as delightfully, if awkwardly, executed as it was in the original. But Kawaguchi isn’t content with just telling more mystery-of-the-week tales. In order to build on his own world, Kawaguchi begins to add layers to Kazu as a character. He also, smartly, shines a light on the ghostly woman who occupies the seat and spends all day reading her novel.

In the first book, we learn that she is cursed to sit there because, when she went back in time to meet her dead husband, she let her coffee get cold. In Tales from the Cafe, we learn a little more about who she is, or was. I remember initially wondering if she was actually reading her novel. And, if so, what novel is it?

Does she ever get bored of re-reading it? In a very satisfying and sweet way, Kawaguchi addresses that point this time around, while also letting us into the ghost’s world in a way that is just as touching as every other story he has written.

Tales from the Cafe toes a very gentle line, and it does so superbly. It offers us more of what we enjoyed from the first novel, while also building the world of the cafe.

The book even includes a character map at the beginning, to help us remember who is connected to whom and how. Our cast of lovable characters is growing, as is the cafe itself. In the book’s third story, it is revealed that the chair has the power to send people forward in time, as well as back. But this power is almost never utilised by customers due to the constricting rules of time travel.

This smartly adds a new angle for a self-contained story, while also expanding on the world-building of the cafe. But it doesn’t push the envelope too much as to ruin the delicate tone and atmosphere that Kawaguchi has so carefully crafted across these cafe stories.

What has remained from the first novel is its same twee and awkward setup and atmosphere. The rules for time travel are silly; the ghost woman is absurd (though nicely fleshed-out this time); the awkward story conceits are strained and difficult to digest.

But these novels, quite honestly, wouldn’t be the same without them. This campy, twee, hyperbolic k-drama tone helps to alleviate some of the sorrow that many cafe tales often leave lingering when they’re over. When I read the original Before the Coffee Gets Cold, I felt that the book was great in spite of its twee and silly rules and conceits.

Now, at last, I feel like this campy awkwardness is what makes these books as engaging as they are. Like a sitcom that blends comedy and tragedy, these books stitch campy strangeness perfectly with bittersweet tales of loss and regret.

Conclusion

Tales from the Cafe is the perfect follow-up to Before the Coffee Gets Cold. It offers us more time-travel stories fuelled by memory and guilt and loss. It builds on the rules and world-building established in the original, without ever stepping on its own toes.

It gives us more of the characters we like, while introducing a few more to keep things interesting. This book gives us just enough of something new while staying true to what made the original such a roaring success. There is heart and love and sweetness to spare. Kawaguchi is a special kind of storyteller.

Buy a copy of Tales from the Cafe here!

I love big, sprawling, bustling cities. I love the way they constantly shift and change, never staying the same from one year to the next. I love the electric energy, the speed of life, and the background hum that never quietens down.

One thing that makes cities so alluring is how mysterious they are. So many people leading so many unknowable lives. Jayant Kaikini’s No Presents Please attacks that mystery head-on and exposes the lives of the individuals who form Mumbai.

Originally written between 1986 and 2016, the stories in No Presents Please spread far across the city of Mumbai. They take the ordinary, mundane lives of normal people — young couples, lonely bachelors, struggling workers, winners and losers, invisible people – and shine a quiet spotlight on them.

These wonderful little tales ask us to stop and wonder about the guy in the flat above us whom we’ve never talked about, or the bus driver we see every morning but treat like he’s part of the bus, or the angry family next door who are always fighting but we don’t know why.

No Presents Please is set in Mumbai; every person in every story has made this city a part of them; it has raised them, and they are a part of it. They keep its lights on. It’s through them that we get to understand the city from so many different angles.

If you’ve never been to Mumbai (as I haven’t), you’ll feel like you know its streets and alleys by the time you put down No Presents Please. You’ll understand a little better the hopes and struggles and traditions and feelings and routines of its people. This is a book about Mumbai and the people who define the city.

In the book’s first story, City Without Mirrors (originally written in 1999), a Mumbai man in his forties — Satyajit — is happily single, free and untethered to anything at all. Married, as he says, to his city. One day, he is approached by a desperate older man who begs Satyajit to meet his thirty-nine-year-old daughter.

Satyajit is quietly polite but unmoved, and yet he finds himself caught up in the fantasy version of this woman that has wormed her way into his mind. The story ends inconclusively, with Satyajit remaining content but the father in an increased state of anxiety and desperation. It’s a moving story – equal parts amusing, frustrating, and empathetic.

In the titular No Presents Please, a young couple, soon to be married, meet beneath an unfinished flyover, “the iron spikes of the columns between the unfinished stretches on either side seemed to be piercing the sky”. There, they discuss wedding invitations.

Their discussion deepens as it goes, tackling language and etymology, marriage tradition, balance in relationships, money, class, and caste. It’s a short tale, quiet and sweet, but revealing of so much. It demonstrates so artfully the weight of a single sentence or a short, simple conversation. At once delicate and heavy.

One of my favourite stories in the collection is Unframed, a tale which begins with the sentimental before veering into the surreal. It starts with a man who owns a framing shop, passed down to him from his father.

It romanticises and gives depth to the art of framing, and the responsibilities of those who do it. This romanticism is embellished when he obsesses over three abandoned photos that have remained in his shop and were never collected.

Like every story in this collection, Unframed takes a person, a job, or a situation and uses it to frame — no pun intended — larger issues and concepts about city life, family relationships, local traditions, neighbourhood bonds, habits and routines, and more. Unframed does this in a way that is both experimental and charmingly sentimental.

Another favourite, originally penned in 1997, appears towards the end of the book. A Truckful of Chrysanthemums tells the story of a family maid/servant named Durgi. Durgi works diligently for a simple middle-class family, until she begins to fall desperately ill.

Despite how weak she becomes, the family don’t have the heart to dismiss her. Whispers travel across the chawl and Durgi becomes a tragic case.

A Truckful of Chrysanthemums is a fantastic, short example of the elegance of this collection. In a chawl of tenement homes, filled with noise and bustle and a thousand smells, it’s hard to even imagine the pain and joy and fear that is experienced by every tenant every day. This story offers us an example that tugs particularly hard on our heartstrings.

In a talk I went to in early 2020, Deepa Anappara, author of the incredible Djinn Patrol on thee Purple Line, talked about some of the language used to describe buildings, vehicles, food, and aspects of daily life in India. She said that readers may not know these words but it’s easy enough to look them up, and knowing them means knowing the story and setting better. No Presents Please offers us that same opportunity.

When I began reading, I had no idea what a chawl was. But chawls are a common and key detail of Mumbai life. Learning about them, and becoming comfortable with the word, means knowing the people of these stories better. It’s exciting to be offered a chance to learn more about any culture, any history, any town. No Presents Please asks us to be engaged, to empathise, and the payoff is worth every moment.

Another thing I knew nothing about was the Kannada language of India. To read a book originally penned in a language I hadn’t even heard of before felt like a gift. I was being offered, through the wonder of Tejaswini Niranjana’s translation, a window into a world I didn’t have a clue existed. That is as exciting as it is educational. The same can be said for every story in No Presents Please.

Conclusion

The variety on offer in No Presents Please is extraordinary. The variety of places, jobs, ages, situations, emotions, and backgrounds. This book is a full tapestry of Mumbai life; it’s glistening and dirty all at once. It’s exciting and heartbreaking. It’s fast and slow, frightening and gripping.

This book, like the city in which it’s set, is humming with the lives and loves and losses of ordinary, fascinating, terrible, wonderful people.

In 2019, the English translation of Selva Almada’s The Wind That Lays Waste (translated by Chris Andrews) was Books and Bao’s favourite translated novel of the year. Twelve months later, we’re already gifted another sharp and cutting Almada book, once again published by Charco Press: Dead Girls, translated by Annie McDermott.

Dead Girls is a very different beast to Almada’s previously translated work. While The Wind That Lays Waste was a gripping and theatrical work of philosophical fiction, reminiscent of Waiting for Godot, Dead Girls is a piece of “journalistic fiction”, narrated by Almada herself, which chronicles the lives and deaths of three young women who were brutally murdered in 1980s Argentina.

In the book’s introduction, Almada explains how she spent three years researching for this book. That research took the form of interviewing friends, family members, and acquaintances of the dead girls, as well as scouring newspapers from decades past and even “extensive work with the Senora, a medium, a line of connection to the dead girls”.

Completion of the book itself then took a mere three months, and the result is a book which will leave any reader stunned and upset by the brutalism which is inescapably tied to masculinity and machismo. Everything revealed in Dead Girls is within the context of 20th and 21st century Argentinian society, but that doesn’t make the events, the fallout, or the motivation behind them unique to that culture.

Far from it: Dead Girls shines a light on the extent to which toxic masculinity can go; the way in which class divides encourage a flippancy towards the disposable lives of working class women; the way in which women have been — and still are — seen and used as tools; the vulnerable situations into which poor women are forced to place themselves, and the brutal results of that removal of economic choice. All of this can be applied to a global context and it is sickening.

In many ways, Dead Girls is an invitation to share in Almada’s anger. The book takes three cases of femicide, all different but sharing specific traits (the sex of the victim, the country in which it happened, the economic situation of the victim, their age group), and spends 150 pages dissecting the hows and whys of these grim events.

It reveals what so many of us already know: that the treatment of young women – by people they know and people they don’t – is unfair, brutal, dehumanising, manipulative, unjust, and cruel. But the fact that many of us already know this doesn’t make it a book that should be passed over.

Rather, it’s one that provides us with evidence and fuel for when governments and individuals alike attempt to argue against feminist movements, to block the changing of social and economic laws, or to ignore the pleas for fairness and equality of genders within the modern system of our entire planet.

To use Charco Press’ own description of this book, “Femicide is generally defined as the murder of women simply because they are women. In 2018, 139 women died in the UK as a result of male violence (The Guardian).

In Argentina this number is far higher, with 278 cases registered for that same year. Following the success of The Wind That Lays Waste, internationally acclaimed Argentinian author Selva Almada dives into the heart of this problem with this journalistic novel”.

The fact that femicide continues to be a tragic and avoidable plague that can be found in every corner of our modern world is proof of the weight of Almada’s words. The stories of these three young women, none of whom even lived to see their twenty-first birthday, are only a handful taken from hundreds of cases which occur each and every year.

In an article for The Philosophical Salon, published shortly after the original Spanish publication of Dead Girls, Ben Bollig explores in detail the tragic reality of femicide in Argentina, using Dead Girls as inspiration for the discussion (proof of the weight of this journalistic novel.

In the piece, Bollig notes that Almada “portrays a world in which women are often denied agency and the border between sex and violence is fragile. It is not just many men in these towns who display objectionable attitudes towards women; in all of the cases, some degree of victim blaming can be heard in male and female voices: “she was a whore,” “she went out with older men,” or “she looked down on everyone else.” All, it seems, acceptable justifications for a murder.”

I realise I’ve dug this deep into a review of the book without speaking much on the content or style of writing. This is because it’s difficult to put down a book of this magnitude without feeling anything but crushing anger and frustration.

There is so much injustice in the world and Dead Girls combines the gravity of tragic real-life events with the sharp and succinct writing of an author like Selva Almada (translated with precision and real consideration by Annie McDermott) to create fuel for the fires of justice in book form.

To address that awkward omission, however, Dead Girls is mostly written in the first person, with Almada speaking of her own experiences during that three-year-long hunt for information pertaining to the deaths of Andrea, Maria Luisa, and Sarita.

She quotes the victims’ surviving family members and acquaintances often, telling their stories with prosaic weight and some poetic flourish. She recounts the stories of their deaths early on, painting a clear and vivid picture before then letting the first-person narrative become more prominent as the story moves from that of their deaths to Almada’s own search for answers.

Conclusion

At less than 150 pages, Dead Girls is an afternoon’s read, and that afternoon is one that will change you. Much like after experiencing a personal tragedy, you’ll walk away from this book with a vivid memory of where you were, how you were feeling, and what the weather was like on the day that you read Dead Girls.

The change that will come about from reading Dead Girls should hopefully be a positive one: one that inspires each reader to fight for change within their own country’s gender politics. As long as women like Andrea, Maria Luisa, and Sarita can be made victims of femicide, there is little fairness in our society.