(upbeat music)

Meepelous: Hello and welcome, my name is Meepelous (they/he/she)!

And today’s pick is X Gender volumes one and two by Asuka Miyazaki. Originally published between 2020 and 2021 and translated and published in English by Seven Seas between 2022 and 2023. And, lacking foresight I forgot to note who actually did the translation work before I returned them to the library… Apologies.

Content notes for pornography, sex, genital diagrams, rope bondage, sexual harassment, guns, dieting due to dysphoria, transphobia and suicide.

What kinds of keywords came to mind reading this duology? Essay collection, culture, life and death, meeting people, reportage, education, and gender.

The summary for volume one over on goodreads is “An autobiographical diary/essay manga about finding love in Japan as an X-gender person.
At 33 years old, Asuka Miyazaki realizes that they like women! Asuka, however, is neither a woman nor a man–instead, they’re X-gender, which is a non-binary identity. Follow Asuka through the pages of this autobiographical manga as they record the ins and outs of their journey to finding love with a woman.”

A very well put together collection both visually and in its writing. Particularly in volume two the collection does become a bit of a random collection of Miyazaki’s thoughts on life and death, but they explain that covid-19 had made their original plan for the series impossible so that makes sense.

What to expect when you pick up these volumes? Some personal stories and reflection, some definitions of terms, some history of women loving women in Japan, a retelling of little mermaid, reflection on literature, a fairly live and let live take on anti-natalism, an attempt to unpack lookism, OCD, and euthanasia discourse. I found all these tangents pretty interesting and there’s a lot about Japanese culture that Miyazaki is processing and deconstructing. But being very much an outsider to their culture, it’s kind of difficult to go into more detailed analysis then that.

Equally focused inward and outward there was a fair amount of gender and sexual diversity. Overall people are all pretty affirming and friendly, although Miyazaki does get excluded from one gay event because “no dick no entry”. Insert eye roll emoji here.

There’s a bit of discussion of mental health diagnosis and deep thinking about bodies and the implications of genitalia.

That said, place, class and race didn’t really get any air time at all as far as I remember.

Wrapping things up. Interesting, particularly because I find comparing and contrasting Japan and so called north america pretty interesting. The devolving focus was kind of meh I guess. Four stars.

Bye y’all, keep reading and stand with striking workers.

And Literally Graphic is created on land that should be given back to the traditional land holders, which in this case is to my knowledge the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation, an Anishinaabe people, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Huron-Wendat nation.