Reframing Disability in Manga begins and ends with a personal statement, each one providing the answer to a broad question concerning the purpose of the author’s study of the portrayal of disability in manga. The introduction asks, “Why disability?” while the afterword asks, “Why manga?” Manga is a medium capable of inspiring intense affective attachment to stories and characters, while disability is a deeply intimate issue that affects the sense of individual identity of almost every human being, regardless of whether they choose to identify as “disabled.” Yoshiko Okuyama’s decision to bookend her monograph with her own experiences is an apt way to frame her work as a conversation with the reader, as well as an indication of the sensitivity of her treatment of potentially uncomfortable topics.
Reframing Disability in Manga contains seven chapters in addition to the short introduction and afterword. The first two chapters establish a theoretical framework for discussions of media and disability, and each of the remaining five chapters focuses on a broad category of disability. Understanding that many readers may not be familiar with the manga under consideration, Okuyama has structured each chapter to include short “case studies” that are visually distinct from the main text. Each case study introduces a specific manga title, profiles its artist, and includes a high-quality cover image. The well-structured organization of each chapter renders the monograph accessible to non-specialist readers interested in representations of disability in manga and other forms of popular entertainment media, including transnational cinema and superhero comics.
The first two chapters contextualize disability within Japanese history and media culture. “Theorizing Disability” provides a number of key Japanese expressions informing discourses of disability, from religious terms such as inga (karma) to social media buzzwords such as kandō poruno, a loose translation of the pejorative “inspiration porn,” which activists use to refer to ableist depictions of disability as an adversity that can and should be overcome for the benefit of able-bodied people. “Media and Disability” further contextualizes the topic of disability within international discourses of media representation and social justice. This chapter serves to provide readers unfamiliar with disability studies with a concise yet thorough introduction to the field and includes the perspectives of academics and activists speaking from within different countries, cultures, and legal systems.
Each of the following five chapters focuses on a specific category of disability. The third chapter, “Portrayals of Deaf Characters,” challenges the trope of the action hero “supercrip” in seinen manga by examining depictions of deaf characters “as real human beings who demonstrate their deafness authentically through the use of real signs” (48). Okuyama seeks to demonstrate that the common graphic portrayal of deaf people as characters with supernaturally attuned senses and an almost magical ability to lipread is far removed from reality, and that this gap in public perception can be closed by more nuanced representations.
The fourth chapter, “Gender and the Wheelchair,” continues the discussion of the previous chapter regarding how accurate portrayals of physically disabled people can address the common notion that disability only exists as a condition to be cured. Partially because of the relative paucity of mobility-impaired manga heroines, this chapter focuses on men who use wheelchairs to navigate sports, love, and their sense of masculinity. Of special note is Okuyama’s reading of Inoue Takehiko’s bestselling basketball manga Real (Rearu). Among the manga titles discussed in this book, Real is perhaps the most widely translated and thus the most accessible to readers with limited Japanese. Okuyama expands on this investigation of the intersections between disability in the fifth chapter, “Narratives of Blindness,” which focuses more on female characters in josei manga intended for more mature readers.
“Heterogeneity of Autism,” the sixth chapter, begins the chapter with a short summary of the recent transnational movement to reconfigure the stigma of “developmental disorders” (hattatsu shōgai) into a more inclusive understanding of neurodiversity. This discussion will be of special interest to instructors working in higher education, many of whom have been asked to accommodate neurodiverse students without receiving any background training in the difficulties these students face while navigating inflexible educational systems as they struggle to define their own identities. Building on the gender politics of the previous chapters, Okuyama also touches on how reading sensitive portrayals of “ordinary, utterly exhausted mothers who have been battling [stereotypes regarding their children’s autism] without a community support system” can contribute to our understanding of the social pressures faced by mothers in contemporary Japan (123).
The final chapter approaches transgender and queer identity as a “disability.” The author understands that this is problematic and foregrounds the chapter with a lengthy apology. Nevertheless, after this introductory apology has been concluded, “dissociative gender identity disorder” is treated with the same methodological approach as the disabilities covered in other chapters. The author’s choice of texts in this chapter serves to emphasize this disconnect, as narrative elements that had been previously critiqued in the context of disability tend to form the core of many stories shared within the LGBTQ+ community. To give an example, a queer protagonist overcoming difficulty in order to be accepted by their straight friends and family is often the happy ending to coming-out narratives, and it is difficult to view such stories through a lens that sees “inspiration porn” as detrimental to the concerns of identity politics. The author’s ambivalence is clear throughout the chapter, which reads as oddly defensive at times. Although Okuyama provides an entirely reasonable justification for why a chapter on queer and transgender identity would be included in a book about disability, it is still a slightly uncomfortable addition.
Any of the chapters in Reframing Disability in Manga could stand on their own as teaching materials, particularly as supplements to curricula on global approaches to disability or the portrayal of minority identities in popular media. The clarity of Okuyama’s writing and the well-defined structure of each chapter contribute to the accessibility of the monograph, which is of interest to experts in the field of Japanese studies as well as to readers with broader research interests. The accessibility of Okuyama’s study is apt because, as many activists operating within academia and on social media have argued, “manga can serve as an agent of social change and can challenge the reader’s perception of normalcy and bias toward people with disabilities” (150).
Kathryn Hemmann
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia