Yamada Murasaki’s pen is a whisper. Her looseness is not the same looseness as, say, that of Okazaki Kyoko, whose acerbic, scratchy headiness still encompassed an unwaveringly particular physicality; no, Yamada’s pen-strokes are sketched, almost brittle. It puts me, weirdly enough, in the mind of Samuel Beckett: just as Beckett progressively pared down the components of his narratives in order to reveal a raw, almost Platonist language of form, Yamada sought to render emotion in the same fashion; though the influence of Hayashi Seiichi is palpable—the sparing backgrounds, the broad geometries—Hayashi spills far more ink than she ever did, his linework more physically anchored to the page. Frequently, in Yamada, a body will be drawn without a face; a background will be dropped out, an object will be floating in framed midair. Her approach to linework—casual, whether to mask vulnerability or else to underscore it—is enough to make a reader wonder where the line might be placed between a preliminary drawing and a finished one, and whether there is any importance to such nominal refinements.

In the context of Yamada’s cartooning, I think about how we view the idea of ‘relatability’ in modern lingo; especially (though not exclusively) in modern comedy, the ‘relatable’ is viewed as an ur-banal sublimed into cipher. Slipping on a banana peel is not relatable; it is glaringly particular in such a way that we refuse to imagine ourselves in such a scenario, whereas the simple attestation I am stupid is sweeping and broad enough that most of us can concede feeling like that from time to time. The same, supposedly, extends to communications theory; see Scott McCloud, who in Understanding Comics confidently asserts that, “the more cartoony [i.e. simplified] a face is, for instance, the more people it could be said to describe” – a statement whose veracity is entirely dependent not on the skill of the artist so much as on the reader’s [in]ability to recognize the other as possessing intrinsic humanity.

Yamada does not seem to believe in McCloud’s claim; her form of paring down is not a blank surface for her reader to project onto. It is, in fact, the very opposite; it is a process of interrogation, seeking to find the exact point where a line is not abstract but, in fact, tangible. Indeed, one can make the point that the blankness of her cartooning is a blunt communication of the enforced sparseness of her protagonists’ worlds: the world is reduced to shorthand insofar that it is regular. It is something for both reader and character to bristle against.

This bristling abounds in Second Hand Love, recently published by Drawn and Quarterly with a translation by Ryan Holmberg (who, by now, for better or worse, has established something of a de facto one-man-monopoly on Japanese alt-manga translations). This is most Anglophone readers’ second exposure to Yamada’s work, following 2022’s Holmberg/D&Q translation of the astonishing Talk to My Back; the new outing is slim by comparison (only 228 pages versus Talk to My Back‘s 384) and is composed of two stories, A Blue Flame (1983-1984) and the shorter titular Second Hand Love (originally serialized 1986-1987).

Presenting two stories together makes sense, insofar as they share a similar premise: the lover of a married man, being forced to come to terms with who she is outside of the relationship. It likewise makes sense to publish this collection only after Talk to My Back, as its two constituent stories directly interface with that work: Yamada began publishing A Blue Flame while still working on Talk to My Back, which deals with the inverse scenario, as a married housewife seeks to carve out an independent existence upon observing the decline of her marriage (exacerbated by her husband’s infidelity). This recurring theme in her work is at least semi-autobiographic; in a 1985 interview offered at the end of the book (in lieu of the typical sprawling Holmberg essay), Yamada says, “[T]hat feeling of anxiety and betrayal was something I personally had to live with for a long time[…] The kind of domestic situation you see in Talk to My Back, the marriage you see there, was something that had already ended for me in my own life by the time I drew that book, so I was able to approach the topic as if it was about somebody else.”

A Blue Flame‘s opening is just about the perfect introductory vignette: in five pages, it establishes not only the chronological entry point—right after the protagonist is broken up with—but also its encompassing pattern: before she has managed to wrap her head around her breakup, her married lover is already at her door with flowers, and, before she’s noticed, she’s already resigning herself to a reunion. “It’s not like I started this relationship because I ‘liked’ him,“ she will narrate later: “I was faltering. I was falling. He caught me.” At this point, the protagonist is not yet named; she exists less as a person than as an interpersonal negative space, warped around her relationship.

This pattern coils itself around most of the story’s length, much to the dismay of Yamada’s protagonist, Emi. It is equally tender in its emotion and forceful in its deprivations; see the second chapter, “The Wind”: where aloud she asks her lover, Kobayashi, “Just hold me tightly,” her narration rephrases it into “Wring my chest like a cheap sponge. With all your strength, wring this tattered, pithy, pitiful body of mine.” Much of the story is a variation on this theme: the love between Emi and her married lover is only enough until it isn’t; there is always a frustration bubbling underneath its surface, a frustration that stems purely from the fact of her being aware of her ‘less-than’ status. “I’m just doing for you what I’d like done for me… though I know the favor will never be returned,” she tells her lover; her kindness becomes a double-edged sword. 

The final movement of A Blue Flame is sudden—insofar as, having read three quarters of the comic, the reader may comfortably assume that the push-and-pull between the comfort of the status quo and the frustration that stems from it will go on forever, dismissing any hints otherwise—but at the same time inevitable: forced to keep herself small in order to accommodate her lover’s privileged position, Emi finally bursts at the seams, electing to move house and cut off her relationship with her lover. She gets rid of many of her belongings, in an attempted fresh start, but, at the same time, her goal remains the same: she is still interested in a relationship. She finds it in a man her brother had previously attempted, unsuccessfully, to set her up with.

Throughout the story, the cheating husband is characterized mostly by his unwillingness to commit to Emi entirely: where Emi is his satellite, her personality rendered through the orbit of desperation, he is in an existential stasis. This serves as an interesting opportunity for the new man, Yamanoi, to distinguish himself: he is likewise married when he meets Emi – but his meeting with her prompts his realization that his existing relationship is not healthy, not built to last. This is precisely where the two men diverge: Kobayashi is only capable of a non-committal love, whereas Yamanoi is actually willing to act. Here Yamada attempts, and succeeds, a compelling tightrope-walk of ideas: that Emi finally finds her love is not a sign of resignation to institutionalized, formalized, gender-dichotomized relationships, but rather the opposite – it is in itself a fulfillment, as her other recognizes her as an equal. 

By the time Second Hand Love starts up, it feels readily familiar: the protagonist, Yuko, plans much of her life, of her day-to-day, around her married lover, even though she says herself that she isn’t “that fond of him.” When the man stands her up, citing a heavy workload, she feels disposable, blames herself. The story’s divergence, which becomes apparent in the second chapter, feels almost a direct response to the narrow world of A Blue Flame‘s Emi. Here we get a closer view of Yuko’s family: her sister with her husband and child, her brother, and her widowed father—who, we are told during this occasion, had been cheating on her mother for many years, largely cementing the daughter’s view of men and the cost of their marital recklessness. 

This places Yuko in a distinctly different position from the protagonist of A Blue Flame: where Emi lived in a position of simultaneously speculating on her lover’s marital family and not wanting to recognize them as a concrete reality, Yuko needs not speculate – she saw firsthand the price that her father’s infidelity took from her mother. She says of him, “Most men get like this once they retire[:] despite being surrounded by their family, they realize that they are essentially alone. Providing for their wife and children had given them a sense of pride and purpose, but then retirement sweeps that away.” Noteworthy, in this context, is the way Yamada draws the aging father at the time of his first appearance: in theory, he looks on par with the rest of the characters: there is no excess of detail, nor any noteworthy sloppiness—except for one design principle. Being the oldest of the cast members, his hair is completely white, and his clothes are light, with only a sparing dotted texture. This makes him stand out as the only character without any black fills, which immediately makes him appear faded, or unfinished; in an already-sparse world, the man appears dashed off, his very existence tentative.

Yuko, understandably, is greatly cynical toward her father and her lover: she simultaneously recalls the latter, claiming that he gives his wife “the greatest gift there is—the gift of security,” and the former, only realizing the realities of his negligence during his wife’s wake. This state of suspension between the two men gives her a heightened understanding of both, which thrusts her into the narrative’s final transformative action: where Emi finds her new start within the confines of the marital relationship, Yuko looks to her father; she finally breaks off her relationship with her lover, also deciding to close down her self-operated café, in the interest of taking an indefinite trip with the old man. It’s an interesting choice, given the tension between the two throughout the book; when we first meet him the first thing he asks her is whether she comes bearing news of marriage proposals, and when she offers to take him on the trip he jokingly asks if she’s preparing for his death already. Yet another side of him appears at the end of the story: one that is sincerely tormented by his wife’s suffering. Yuko herself could not—should not—punish him, she realizes: he has been doing that perfectly well on his own for years.

Yamada makes a point of treating her protagonists with little judgment; there is no ‘other woman’ or ‘home-wrecker’ framing, but a profound desire to empathize with them. Just like the protagonist of Talk to My Back before them, the heroines of A Blue Flame and Second Hand Love seek one thing: individuation, or the formation of conscious, independent intent. This can be achieved through many means—fulfilling work, egalitarian romance, or the observation of your subjects of resentment—but they all boil down, ultimately, to a visceral, profound engagement with your surroundings. “One can ultimately only process the world through their own feelings,” the cartoonist says in the same 1985 interview, but the inverse rings just as true: feelings are only processed through the outside world. 

A curious, careful observer of emotion and behavior, Yamada Murasaki’s pen may be a whisper—but its voice carries for miles.