Abstract
This chapter focuses on tōjisha narratives—first-person narratives about lived experience of mental health distress. It first discusses the literature genre of autobiography and then zooms in on a rapidly growing genre of life writing on disability and illness in the United States. It then proceeds to discuss Japan’s tōbyōki (illness narratives), a literature genre that began in the 1970s and proliferated in the late 1990s through the 2000s in Japan. The chapter ends with a discussion of autobiographical comics, especially graphic memoirs of illness as a unique and noteworthy genre to segue into the next chapter on essay manga—Japan’s equivalent of autobiographical comics, which is the genre to which this book’s tōjisha manga belongs.
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Notes
- 1.
The genre jiden shares such characteristics as humor, sometimes gallows humor, the presence of supportive people, and the happy ending that are also some of the common characteristics of the selected tōjisha manga titles. An example of jiden is Shigematsu Kiyoshi’s (2002) Kiyoshiko, a memoir about his childhood as a stutterer, in which Shigematsu recalls his painful interactions with schoolmates and contrasts that experience with his imagined, stammer-free chats with his imaginary friend “Kiyoshiko” whose name was taken from the Christmas song, Kiyoshi konoyoru (“Silent Night”).
- 2.
Reaume (2017) also adds that in Canada and the United States, academics began to publish on “the history and current status of the mad movement” instead of medical history perspectives in the early 2000s.
- 3.
According to Hawkins (1999), the authors of autopathographies in the 1990s are more likely to be middle-class, Christian, public figures (journalists, athletes, ministers, etc.), including movie stars. Such “celebrity memoirs” are more likely narratives with the “overcoming” theme based on the medical model of mental disability (e.g., Brooke Shields’s 2006 book, Down Came the Rain: My Journey Through Postpartum Depression) and have increased in publication in the past thirty years (Reaume 2017). However, in some cases, mental health memoirs by non-public figures have also become bestsellers. One such example cited by Couser (2021) is Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted (1993), based on the author’s experience in a psychiatric hospital confinement after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Although she is still considered “the progenitor of the now common mental-illness memoir,” the author never expected her narrative would become a mega hit and be adapted into a popular movie, a seemingly surprising yet somewhat expected outcome propagated by the Clinton administration’s antidiscrimination laws against psychiatric service users and the publication of Listening to Prozac by Dr. Perter Kramer as a criticism of the psychiatric system (Merrigan 2018).
- 4.
Furthermore, Hawkins (1999) believes that autopathographies are also helpful for physicians: Doctors find little or no time to get to know their clients these days but are still expected to be aware of the patients’ wishes, needs, and fears, and autopathography books provide them with an opportunity to obtain the patient’s point of view and a longitudinal observation of the illness (because the memoirs tend to include their conditions both before and after the treatment). Similarly, he argues, patient narratives help physicians understand common complaints that patients have (e.g., how physicians fail to express empathy for them; dilemmas from receiving conflicting pieces of advice from different medical experts). Moreover, patient perspectives also inform physicians of alternative methods and the cultural attitudes or assumptions about the illness, treatment, or recovery that patients have, encouraging them to explore unconventional ways to help their patients fight the illness. Seen in this light, autopathographies are, in Hawkins’s (1999) words, a veritable gold mine of patient attitudes and assumptions about all aspects of their illness. This view seems applicable even in the millennium as Couser (2021) states that narrative medicine is gaining strong support from medical practitioners. It is only natural that autopathographies continue to be in high demand, many of them bestsellers.
- 5.
Upon reviewing my first draft of this chapter, Michael Rembis told me that he has been working on a monograph on the historical documentation of autobiographies by mad people. However, as he informed me, although it would be “super helpful” in my thinking on this book (email on September 30, 2021), his book, Writing Mad Lives—In the Age of the Asylum, will not be in print until 2023 (email on July 12, 2022). Thus, it is unfortunate that I am unable to refer to his scholarship on mad people’s memoirs in this chapter.
- 6.
From a disability studies point of view, it is also critically important to increase public awareness of mental illness stigma, to reduce the tōjisha’s internalized self-stigma. As shown in this chapter, Kodaira and Ito (2011) emphasize the importance of disseminating tōjisha narratives to non-tōjisha audiences.
- 7.
In Reframing Disability in Manga (2020), I pointed out that some of the media’s common portrayals of the disabled are “good cripples,” “superscripts,” as well as “victims” and “villains,” as criticized by many disability studies scholars. We need to be careful not to see Mori’s public speech as a self-portrayal of a plucky, courageous “overcomer,” especially because he shares with the public not only his achievements but also his current struggles.
- 8.
Arizuka’s (2005) tōbyōki is titled Utsubyō wo taikenshita seishinkai no shohōsen: Ishi toshite, kanja toshite, shiensha toshite (Prescriptions by a psychiatrist who experienced depression: as a medical doctor, as a patient, as a supporter). As a psychiatrist who developed major depression and moved to a peaceful rural place in Okinawa for his new life, Arizuka offers treatment suggestions as well as prevention measures from the tōjisha point of view. While providing professional medical information about depression, he illustrates his lived experience of a mental health crisis in ways that make it comprehensible enough for those with no experience and offers his own unorthodox strategies for recovery. He presents his opinions about medical biases and highlights the shared goals of many people diagnosed with depression: how to accept and live with this condition as well as how to endure unwanted reactions from his surroundings.
- 9.
Such positive effects of the deikea are depicted in the tōjisha manga, Wagaya no haha wa byōki desu (My Mother is a Sicko), by Nakamura Yuki.
- 10.
In this chapter, my primary focus in the literature review is on the works of comic studies scholars both in the West and Japan as they are well versed in the semiotic analysis of autobiographical comics. For the literature review pertaining to critiques on disability representation in popular culture by disability scholars, see Chapter 2 of Reframing Disability in Manga (2020). Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narratives (2016) is also recommended as a book that explores the representation of disability in comics from a disability studies perspective.
- 11.
When I presented a talk about tōjisha manga at the early stage of this manuscript, one of the comments I received and found helpful was that I should examine the root of memoirs beyond the field of manga. Also, when Michael Rembis read the early version of this chapter, he recommended that I look into life writing from disability studies perspectives. Thus, this chapter includes my scholarly responses to the feedback by both.
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Okuyama, Y. (2022). Tōjisha Narratives. In: Tōjisha Manga. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00840-5_3
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