What Should We Do?: A Review of My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness
We, as humans, still don’t know what to do. Any two people share 99.9% of their DNA, yet we live remarkably pluralistic lives. Families permanently split due to their members’ differences, wealth gaps incessantly widen, and wars wax and wane into existence, all due to the fact that we still haven’t discovered the best way to live. What is most appalling, however, is the question of why humans are so different, despite the fact that we assume similarity to relate to others and to create society in the first place. When you “look through someone else’s eyes” or “get in someone’s head”, you are just superimposing your memories of consciousness while imagining yourself in their physical position, after all. Perhaps a model of living focused on the evolving stochastic relationships between us could alleviate our egocentrism and get us closer to discovering what the hell we should do with any of our lives. This requires an ethic of taking those around you seriously and ignoring our knee-jerk preconceptions.
I believe we could all learn a lot from Kabi Nagata’s endlessly personal, yet universal autobiographical manga, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness (2016). Glancing at any synopsis of Experience with Loneliness, listening to someone explain the manga to you or even reading the first five-pages is enough to make a reader question, “Why would anybody decide to lose their virginity to an escort?” This question challenges the reader to take Kabi seriously all the way through the manga and relate it to their own experiences to make any sense of what they are reading. By frontloading the manga this way, Kabi Nagata ultimately places our mind in a perceptive mode. The remarkable honesty and forthrightness she displays generate a secure, nonjudgmental opportunity to put ourselves in Kabi’s shoes to learn something.
What should we be doing with our lives? I don’t know; you don’t know; I doubt twenty-eight-year-old Kabi Nagata knew. What she did know, however, was that apparently everyone else knew the answer, and she needed to conform to discover their knowledge. Experience with Loneliness begins by establishing the source of Kabi’s adulthood mental struggles: the constant battle to conform and her recurrent failures to do so. The text of Experience with Loneliness even establishes that for “social outcasts” there is a severance between who one is and who one wants to be, or even should be. It follows that conformity can close that gap.
Kabi’s web of mental health problems illustrates this clearly: her eating disorder is illustrated as a system of punishment for her inability to meet parental expectations. Her self-harm and hair-pulling comes from a desire to distract herself from the pain of consistently failing to conform, an emotional pain so intense that physical pain alleviates it. Such profound sadness stems from her failures to stay in university, maintain her job due to her binge-eating, or make any friends. Before Kabi decides to hire a sex worker, her adult life is a viscous stream of psychological violence and social abuse. She desperately wishes for the comfortable, normal lives that everybody else seems to have, a longing that culminates in Kabi’s pensive yearning for nonexistence. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness presents a type of biographical story few want to tell (one that is strange, embarrassing, or revealing), but many need to share. Vulnerable stories like these help “social outcasts” of the world realize they are losing sight of their own needs, perpetually seeking external validation instead of cultivating internal well-being.
Deeming the suffering of “outcasts” as self-inflicted oversimplifies the social elements that create it. For someone like Kabi, those elements include a lack of social connection, arbitrary social pressures, self-loathing, a system not accommodating to her unique identity markers and eccentricities, and fear of an incomprehensible future. I don’t doubt that modern outcasts experience a mix of these, if not all of them.
In modern times, social outcasts are deemed sub-human. We display them as zoo exhibits for entertainment or hollow them out, pacify them, make pale imitations of them, and mount them on our walls like taxidermy, to the point of denying their consciousness. Kabi’s desire for normalcy makes her reject her whole identity, climaxing in her rejection of her gender and sexuality: “I didn’t want to accept that I was a woman. It wasn’t that I wanted to be a man; it was more like I hated belonging to a gender at all.” Society ignores this struggle, so outcasts are broken down or retreat to their hiding places. Such can be seen in many outcast groups: punk was an anarchist movement confined to "misfit" clubs and bars but now exists in its neutered form of strange haircuts and pop-punk, while “punk” remains a pejorative in modern English. Modern outcasts, such as furries, are lambasted for the heinous crime of finding anthropomorphic animals appealing. Nobody has found how to live their lives; they’re scavenging for it, and who are we to stop them? As Kabi describes, her decisions are due to the fact that she was given no “map” to a content life; her decisions come from the few signs and clues she has received from the world.
Years of this self-rejection eroded Kabi’s identity. Such repression manifested in her contradictory adoration of, and physical attachment to, her mother, which she acknowledges is a trauma response. Her perpetual suffering startled her, forcing her to confront her desires in order to keep living. For Kabi this meant the need to have sex.
Echoes of this desire for normalcy are baked into every fiber of the visual style of Experience with Loneliness, illustrating manga’s strengths as a medium. The beauty of the medium is that a reader can process plot points at a speed their mental reactions permit; a shocking, mindbowing, or impeccable moment can last forever for a reader just as they impact Kabi forever. Moments like her mental downward spiral, her search for jobs, but most importantly, each step she took to hire a sex worker and lose her virginity are enhanced in this way. Kabi borrowing 10,000 yen from her mother to pay her prostitute, Yuka, lasted forever by taking up an entire page, and I sat stunned, staring at the panel in real life. The lengthy trek to the hotel lasts forever. Their bath together lasts forever. The appreciatively awkward and lengthy experience of Yuka trying to find Kabi’s hymen lasts forever. These experiences fester forever both in Kabi’s self, and the potent presence of the art.
Reaching the last page of Experiences with Loneliness fulfills a cosmic connectedness. The manga must be read perceptively, while relying on sympathy. This way, it is shown that human agents have to process what other people experience, (a bit counterintuitively), through themselves.
Perhaps those labeled “social outcasts” could teach us a few things. That’s the power of art, after all: anyone can express themselves to the world. I don’t know what we humans should be doing with any of our lives. But I do know we should be scavenging for a valuable lifestyle change–one that would teach us what life even is. We should focus more on helping ourselves, rather than conforming to society. In many circumstances as strange as Kabi’s, that might just mean hiring a lesbian escort to lose your virginity.
Kwaku Asamoah is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences majoring in Chemistry and minoring in Physics. He likes reading books with really insane titles (like this one) in public. The next ones on his list are: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?and Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism.
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