In my recent conversation on with the folks at Manga Mavericks about My Alcoholic Escape From Reality (a conversation that will go up on their Patreon later this month) we talked a little bit about this book as well. In the comments on Nagata Kabi’s TCAF spotlight, some lovely person expressed a wish that the author’s next book is about her hugging kittens. Well…it is definitely not that.
Having given herself recognition that her comic essays are a valid form of artistic expression, Nagata-sensei has once again turned the spotlight on herself. In Meisou Senshi – Nagata Kabi (迷走戦士・永田カビ), she tackles some of the things we might have been asking all along about her relationship with her gender and sexuality…and how that, and her physical and mental health, affect and are affected by that relationship.
This is not an easy book to read. If anything, it open up whole new areas of discomfort. Content Warning: this book deals with sexual assault as a child. But, as we make our way through this in her wake, we can see (more clearly than we can with ourselves) how pieces of a life make up a whole. Her discussion of how insurmountable was the effort of filling out the questions on a dating app, really struck home with me in regards to something wholly unrelated to dating.
Once again we see the power of a comic essay. This book contains increasingly intimate knowledge of her past, and tantalizing tidbits of her present, but we know we will never know the actual person through these. These chapters are the comic equivalent of Van Gogh’s self-portraits….a visual record of her over time looking at a mirror and drawing what she sees. Some days the face that looks back at her is more haunted than others…sometimes it is almost happy. This records allows her to explore why that might be…and expose what the roots of that haunted look is.
I am curious, for reasons that will become immediately apparent when you read this book, what her parents thought of it. Nagata-sensei’s feelings about how she hurt her family in her initial volumes are made plain in later volumes and in her TCAF interview. This volume wasn’t going to make for light dinner table conversation and yet, I got the feeling that she and her family may have struck a bargain over this and while it may not be fun, they won’t be blindsided again.
Seven Seas has announced the license of this book as My Wandering Warrior Existence, which has a projected release date in English of March 2022. If you don’t want to wait, you can read this online in Japanese on Web Action.
Yet again, I will not be rating this book, for reasons that will become apparent when you read it.
It is compelling.
Next up, we return to the beginning, with her plumbing the depth of her relationship with food, in Meisou Senshi・Nagata Kabi Gourmet De GO! (迷走戦士・永田カビ グルメでGO！) the first chapter of which available on Web Action.
