How to describe Talk to My Back, a classic collection of graphic stories by alt-manga’s feminist star, Yamada Murasaki? These tales of thwarted-ness and domestic ennui were written in the 80s, but Japan being what it is – only last month it was reported that when abortion pills are finally made available to women in the country, partner consent will still be required – their atmosphere often feels much closer to that of the 50s or early 60s. At moments, it’s almost as if Murasaki has set out to fictionalise Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. If her stories are pensive to the point of dreaminess, they’re also full of frustration, a discontent that simmers like a hot pan. I’m so glad Drawn & Quarterly has seen fit to put them into an English edition for the first time.
The lights have given way to darkness in the rain-soaked Costa Rican villa where I read Meron Hadero’s debut collection, “A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times.” I don’t like reading short story collections in order, yet, as I crack open this one midway and begin “Sinkholes” about an Ethiopian boy in the midst of a standoff with his small-town Florida teacher over the use of the n-word, it occurs to me that I better start at the beginning. This remarkably tense story wasn’t at all what I expected. In fact, Hadero’s collection is full of surprises. With stories set in Berlin and Iowa, Los Angeles and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Hadero establishes her willingness to be an insider for the outsiders.
We might learn more from Buddhism if, rather than carving out what we like in its history, we take seriously its limitations and failures, and ask how its genuinely illuminating philosophy can more readily overcome them. To do so, we need works like Davis’s that are helpful guides to the kind of peace and equanimity that can help end suffering. But we also need more introductions to Zen and other worldviews that run toward the pathways of entangled and unpleasant interdependence that constitutes the globalized world.