Kaoru Yoshida
Comic creator

Introduction

My family home is in the countryside of the Hokuriku region. When I was young, my leisure activities were playing outside or immersing myself in manga. I always enjoyed copying pictures, and the pictures I drew were praised by the people around me, so I started to have a vague sense that it would be fun to be a manga artist while I was still in elementary school.

Back then, I liked manga for boys, like those in Jump, Sunday, or Magazine, but what I read most was the entire “Barefoot Gen” (Hadashi no Gen) series, which my parents had bought as a part of my education. These did not present a whitewashed picture, but rather showed the dirtiness and purity, hope and despair and, above all, reality of human deeds. I remember even now the great impact that they had on me in my elementary school days, a time when I was very impressionable.

In elementary school, there was one free period a week, and I spent a year drawing an entire manga of over 100 pages during this time. The content was rambling and disjointed, but I think that this was the first time that I got a taste of the sense of achievement and enjoyment of working steadily on a single task to complete it. Around the same time, I became aware that my younger sister was intellectually disabled, and began to feel pressure as her elder brother. Looking back now, I think that I perhaps came to Tokyo and sought to become a manga artist because I wanted to escape from my sister and from a feeling of being trapped in the countryside. 

The background to my decision to draw “The Distance between Blood”

After moving to Tokyo and working for a while as an assistant, I became a manga artist. Just around the time that I became able to take a breather from the serial I was working on, a particular news item leapt into prominence. This was the Tsukui Yamayuri-en incident . Of course, the content of the incident had a profound impact, but the words and thinking of the perpetrator were extremely shocking for my mental state at that time. 

  “Disabled people cannot do anything except create unhappiness.”

When I heard these words, I started asking myself once again whether I had truly faced and related to my younger sister.

Was my sister’s existence a cause of unhappiness for me? In order to know the answer to this, I decided to start by getting to know my sister herself. I reflected on my past and present feelings about her, gradually came into contact with her current work and her relationships with other people, and felt that I wanted to reconsider my own thinking about my sister through the medium of manga. This was what prompted me to create “The Distance between Blood” (Chi no Kankaku).

The dilemmas and pressure I faced as the elder brother of a disabled person

In a scene that I included in the first volume of my manga, when we were at elementary school, my classmates found out that my sister wet herself, and I got mad at her on the way home. I drew this scene almost exactly as it happened. I still think that this was really terrible behaviour; but it was an action that came after what felt like a truly awful period of my life, having been labelled as the elder brother of a disabled sister ever since I was small.

This incident from the past had been on my mind for a long time, even after becoming an adult. There were times when I identified what I had done with the perpetrator of the Yamayuri-en incident, causing me anguish. Of course, I also experienced conflicting feelings about making intellectual disability, including this past, into the subject of manga. It is an extremely sensitive topic and, given each person’s different environment, position, and values, I wondered if it were my place to depict it.

However, as I faced and related to my younger sister while reflecting on the past, I realized that what I really wanted to depict in this manga was not “disability” or “being the sibling of a person with a disability”, but what “family” means to me. 

Changes during the creative process

In order to create this manga, I visited my younger sister’s workplace. This allowed me to glimpse an aspect of my sister and of her relationships with others that I had not known, and so I gradually began to understand my sister’s nature. It also created a place not only for my younger sister but also for our mother, father, and elder sister, all the family members surrounding us, to exchange our opinions and share our values.

As a result, I feel as though I am starting to be able to see the path that I ought to take in my own life from now on. Trying to learn about my family became an opportunity to know myself.

Tomoyuki, the main character of this manga, is of course a projection of myself, and I am depicting his psyche realistically. However, as the story unfolds and moves from the past into the future, there are ways in which I have entrusted my hopes and the things which I was unable to do in the past to the character of “Tomoyuki”. On the other hand, I have depicted the character of “Chie”, who is modelled on my younger sister, in a pure and unaltered way, sticking as closely as possible to how she is in reality, without introducing any of my thoughts or hopes.

The manga “The Distance between Blood” is a fictional work throughout, but one that I drew in a spirit close to that of a non-fiction essay. Just as Tomoyuki and Chie grow and get to know one another in the course of the manga, I empathized with them as I drew it because I have experienced exactly the same feelings with my sister.

What I want to convey through this work

Values related to disability or being the sibling of a person with a disability are very individual. There are some people who are not at all interested, and others who worry and struggle with this each day. I think that the only commonality is that each individual needs to squarely face, relate to, and get to know the people around them, irrespective of whether or not they have a disability. My latest work, “The Distance between Blood”, was a story about getting to know “family”, but I think that in the context of various different relationships with people, such as friends, seniors, or bosses, getting to know the other person makes you better able to reconsider the ways that you and those around you live.

However, of course intellectual disabilities often deviate from your preconceived categories. We certainly need to try our best to accept the other person, but when we feel that we want to get away, I think being able to consult with those around us and then escape is one important option.

Learning about the other person, learning about yourself, and reconsidering the best option for yourself: this story is no more than the tale of my personal experience, but I hope that it will serve as an opportunity for my readers to turn back on and think about themselves.

The distance between people with disabilities and those without; the distance between an elder brother and younger sister; the distance between people – by learning about these, in what ways will we go on constructing these distances? I do not think that there are any fixed answers. There are as many distances as there are relationships between people.

I intend to try my hand at various different genres of manga in the future, but I hope to continue to depict this same topic of relationships and distances between people.