My Solo Exchange Diary & My Alcoholic Escape from Reality - Nagata Kabi

Blah blah blah, I'm not reading. Blah blah blah, I'm depressed. Blah blah blah, I'm struggling to find meaningful impacts of my daily life in the grind of the inevitable descent of loneliness and the fact I have no effect on the matter of existence I'm living - through my art, work, breath or alone time...So lets talk about comics baybeeeeee~!

If Alison Bechdel would let herself cry and knew what a Gundam was, she'd be Nagata Kabi. 

I probably made those comparisons when I read My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, or at least it was on my mind. A distinctive difference between the two beyond their politics, and being completely different people, is the way that Bechdel makes a lot of her work in reference to others, where Nagata's breakout work is very internally focused. This is played with a bit because the meta of being a writer has entered both...writers...works and actively affects their lives.

Are You My Mother? by Bechdel is actually a good analogue then as Fun Home is more on par with what eventually enters in My Solo Exchange Diary - where the analyses she has now put in print for the world to read and judge her artistic existence by are reacted to in positive and negative extremes. She also, like Bechdel, faces writing about her parents reactions to her work beyond her lesbianism - the reveal of the secretive familial self affects her family, her ideas of her relationships, the people she (non)fictionalizes, etc.

There are multiple points where the guilt of misrepresentation and the shame of oneself being seen as seen in ones work overtake the reality of simply being. There is this Yehuda Amichai quote that I remember being in contest with along his other problematicisms, but one that I'm slowly accepting. He talks about not writing poetry about things as they happen. That it is detrimental, or useless to. Rather, he argues that poetry comes after.

Nagata's work in these 3 collections is very much about that discussion of creating and the fallout of recognition, with several revealing and harmful things oriented around making her work and living a life that is both obscured (Nagata Kabi is a penname for instance) and hyper-revealing/ever being put into the context of becoming art. It doesn't surprise me too that she starts referencing more than her experiences of other people as she sees them, but like I have here too repeatedly, other work and the work of doing the work itself as part of the story. For Bechdel that's been vastly literary works, and I find it refreshing how Nagata's is a continuation outside of a western-canon and want to see more work like this.