Second Hand Love (2024)

Listen to this post:

For most of the English speaking (and reading) world, 2022’s Talk to My Back was likely the first time they experienced the comics of Yamada Murasaki, a manga artist few had read (even in Japan) known for her work in the style known as gekiga, or manga designed for mature readers. Like Offshore Lightning, Saito Nazuna’s short story manga released last year, it was an important work that helped introduce a genre of manga that had been criminally underrepresented in English until now.

Second Hand Love gives Murasaki’s new fans two stories featuring women having affairs with married men, told almost entirely through confessional vignettes that reveal the interiority of our protagonists that vacillate between scandalous and acceptable, offering rationalizations for their behavior they (and even readers) may look on as justifications. Also included is a series of bonus artwork created to accompany author Mita Masahiro’s 1997 novel “Koisuru Kazoku” (A Loving Family).

Murasaki’s gift for illustrating the desires of her protagonists is on full display in both stories, all rendered in Murasaki’s clean, direct style allowing them to express and voice things not usually said out loud.

A Blue Flame (published between 1983-1984 as Yurari Usuiro i.e. “A Shimmering Pale Color”), is both the collection’s longest and most confessional. Emi finds ways to exert whatever power she can as the “other woman” in her relationship with a man who is married with children that are almost passive-aggressive. When he asks what she’s thinking about, Emi answers “That I hate people who don’t value their families.” Sensing her hypocrisy, she’s quick to turn defense into offense: “Don’t you dare think about them while you’re with me!”

Second Hand Love (published between 1986-1987) follows Yuko, a young cafe owner having an affair with a married man while confronting her own family’s intergenerational abuse of trust. As with Emi, Yuko refuses to feel guilty about carrying on a relationship build on infidelity, yet can sense her indecisiveness means continuing the family’s legacy of open secrets and betrayals.

Ryan Holmberg returns, once again, to provide not just a thoughtful translation of Murasaki’s text but another fascinating biographical study of her in the form of an edited (and fleshed out) 1985 interview from Japanese magazine “Advertising Review” (Kokoku Hihyo), which could be seen as a companion piece to his essay “The Life and Art of Yamada Murasaki” included in Talk to My Back. Holmberg is proving to be the authority on all-things gekiga, and comic historians should also check out his extensive collection of other essays on the subject.

It would be easy to catalog Yamada Murasaki’s Second Hand Love as an archaic snapshot into the world of Japanese domesticity during the bubble economy of the 1980s, especially those of Japanese mistresses each serving their roles (and often to the same men) while confronting their dueling desires for eroticism and domesticity. Western audiences, especially younger women, may find Yamada’s characterizations especially progressive and modern, but one can’t help but feel a little sadness watching these women go through so much trouble only to stay so miserable.