Kazuma Yoshimura
Professor, Faculty of Manga, Kyoto Seika University

If I say “disability and manga” in the same breath, it may seem like a novel combination. In fact, however, there are various manga taking disability as their subject matter, from past masterpieces to the works that everyone has been talking about in recent years. Freshest in our memories is perhaps the popularity achieved by Uoyama’s “Punk Boy and White Cane Girl” (Yankee-kun to Hakujo Garu), the original work on which the TV drama “Love’s in Sight” (Koi Desu!), starring a partially sighted heroine, was based. Through these manga, the situations faced by people with disabilities and those around them have been widely disseminated in society, literally “in a visible manner”, leading to a deeper understanding of disability in several cases.

In this essay, then, at the same time as reviewing manga works on the topic of disability from each time period, I will introduce the characteristics seen in a particular genre and initiatives aimed at disabled people, in order to think about the diverse relationships between “disability and manga”.

Manga depicting disability

First on the list of manga dealing with disability in a real way are probably the works of Osamu Yamamoto. Many readers have been brought to tears by his non-fiction works, including “Far-off Koshien” (Harukanara Koshien, 1988: hereinafter, the year of first appearance), in which Okinawan children who have become hearing-impaired due to rubella spread from a US military base form a hardball baseball club and aim to participate in the qualifying round of the Koshien national high school baseball tournament, and “House of Acorns” (Donguri no Ie, 1993), which depicts the everyday lives of children with multiple disabilities and their parents and the social environment surrounding them from multiple perspectives, as well as by his careful and true to life portrayals, based on his own research.

In the 2000s, one long-running serial appeared after another. These included “Real” (Real, 1999), which deals with wheelchair basketball, by Takehiko Inoue, famous for “Slam Dunk”; Keiko Tobe’s “With the Light” (Hikari to Tomo ni – Jiheishoji o Kakaete , 2001), faithfully depicting the interactions between a child with autism and his mother; and “IS – a Sex that is Neither Male nor Female” (IS – Otoko de mo Onna de mo nai Sei) by Chiyo Rokuhana, which spells out the states of mind and environments of intersex people in a multifaceted way.

Furthermore, in the 2010s, various different disabilities were depicted, including relatively unknown conditions. I would like to choose two works dealing with school stories and introduce them here in a little more detail.

Yoshitoki Oima’s “A Silent Voice” (Koe no Katachi, 2011) is a manga for young boys depicting the subtleties of the relationship between a young girl with a hearing impairment and an able-bodied young boy, but what deserves special mention is that it was published in Shukan Shonen Magajin, a major magazine, and was a big hit. It took first place in the “For Males” category of “This Manga is Great! 2015”, and a movie-length animated version was produced. Moreover, it attracted attention for using techniques uniquely suited to manga, such as expressing hard-to-hear voices by letters cut in half vertically, or by putting a large X on the face of the person to whom the character was talking to communicate their closed mind.

Shuzo Oshimi’s “Shino Can’t Say Her Name” (Shino-chan wa Jibun no Namae ga Ienai, 2013) features a high school student struggling with stuttering, and was modeled on the author himself. Since the speed and tempo at which manga is read is up to the reader, unlike with a movie, the expression of stuttering, which produces pauses, tests the ability of the manga artist. This work succeeds in this task: for example, the scene where the heroine musters up her courage, and her voice, to introduce herself in the classroom, is so real that we, the readers, also feel as though we are going to choke.  

The increase in manga about parasports, such as “Pure White Day” (Mashirobi, 2017; written by Masahito Kagawa, illustrated by Shou Wakasa), which deals with marathons for the blind, and Narumi Shigematsu’s “Blade Girl – One-legged Runner” (Blade Girl – Kataashi no Runner, 2018), about a high school girl with a prosthetic leg who tackles athletics, is another noteworthy trend in recent years. The influence of Tokyo’s hosting of the Paralympics can be seen here, but whether this will just be a passing fad or whether it will continue into the future will perhaps reveal the degree to which sports for the disabled have taken root as an issue of interest to society.  

Compatibility of disability and essay manga

On the other hand, there is a genre in which manga dealing with disability and illness increased rapidly in the 2000s. This is “essay manga” – in other words, memoir manga depicting the actual daily lives of the manga artists or those around them.

Famous examples include Tenten Hosokawa’s “My S.O. has Depression” (Tsure ga Utsu ni Narimashita, 2006) and Bakka Okita’s “I’m Messing Up Every Day – as a Person with Asperger’s, as a Manga Artist” (Mainichi Yarakashite Imasu. Asperger de, Mangaka de, 2012). However, in recent years, we also see several records of the experiences of families who have disabled children, such as Monzusu’s “I Thought That Life Was Hard, Then I Found That I and My Child Had Developmental Disorders” (Ikizurai to Omottara Oyako de Hattatsu Shougai Deshita, 2016).

I would like to point out three ways in which these essay manga are highly compatible with disability. The first is that, since they are based on concrete episodes which happened close to home, there is a lot of useful information for the reader. The second is that, since the illustrations are simpler and the number of pages fewer than story manga, even heavy topics do not become too heavy. The third is that, since these paperbacks are usually found on the shelves for regular books rather than on those dedicated to manga, it is easier for people who would not normally read manga to find them. In essence, they function as a kind of “information magazine for adults in manga format”.

In addition, it became easy for ordinary individuals to disseminate information via Twitter and other social media in the 2010s, and so the number not only of professionals but also of amateurs or beginners producing essay manga increased. Several of these laid bare the concerns of the authors or their families. Moreover, from 2019 onwards, sales of electronic manga overtook those of printed manga, and this gap is forecast to widen, boosted by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In these ways, at the same time as raising society’s interest in and empathy for disability, essay manga also play a role in allowing information provision and self-expression by families with disabilities. Please take a look at this diverse and deep range of manga, encompassing physical disabilities, mental illness, intellectual disabilities, and even rare intractable diseases.

The “LL manga” endeavour

Thus far, I have talked about manga works and genres, but there is another area that I would like to introduce as we think about the relationship between disability and manga. This is what is known as “LL manga”, an endeavour with which I have been directly involved.

It is generally thought that “manga are easy to understand”. The existence of many study or information manga with titles like “Understand X Through Manga!” is proof of this. However, in fact, manga are not simple reading material at all. They have a complex grammar, or unspoken conventions, such as the changeable layout of the frames, a great variety of speech and thought bubbles, unique onomatopoeia, ways of speaking that depend on the roles of the characters, and so on.

The reason why we end up thinking that “manga are easy to understand” despite all this is because we have acquired the ability to read and draw manga, or manga literacy, from a young age almost without realizing it. In this case, though, “we” does not include people with disabilities. This is because almost all existing manga have been addressed towards people without disability.

However, I learned that media known as “LL books”, which are easy to read for people with intellectual disabilities or on the autism spectrum, were in circulation in Scandinavia, and came to work on the creation of a manga version, “LL manga”. The concrete background to and achievements of this initiative are collected together in an article which I co-authored, “An invitation to LL manga, which are aimed at people with disabilities – are manga really ‘easy to understand’?” (2018). I would be glad if you had a look at this to see how the “LL manga” featured there to see how they are different from ordinary manga.

I strongly hope that through repeated initiatives such as this one, not only conventional “manga which teach us about disability” but also “manga which are easy for disabled people to understand” may become a bit more common in the world. A new act is about to begin for “disability and manga” in terms of the diversity of the audience, too