Abstract
This chapter presents the final tōjisha manga, Shiramizu Sadako’s single-volume manga, Uchi no OCD. The story tells about her husband, Ashika’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, an illness manifested with strong obsessions and compulsions, which thousands of people still hide in public in Japan. To draw the episodes, Shiramizu elicited Ashika’s direct feedback on his experience through the research method of kikitori. This chapter first describes this method and then illustrates Ashika’s debilitating symptoms influenced by the 2011 natural disaster in Japan. The chapter first provides contextual information such as the manga’s target readership and the author’s background and then analyzes her artistic styles and storytelling characteristics, drawing on an interview with her and sample panels from her manga.
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Notes
- 1.
This description appears in the APA’s DSM-5 (2013, p. 237). Similarly, the WHO’s ICD-11 clusters obsessive-compulsive and related disorders as a group whose key symptoms are obsessions, intrusive thoughts, and preoccupations (https://icd.who.int/browse11/l-m/en#/http%3a%2f%2fid.who.int%2ficd%2fentity%2f1321276661). This entry is listed under the category of mental, behavioral, or neurodevelopmental disorders.
- 2.
A common Japanese myth is that “a person who loves to clean” (kireizuki na hito) falls into this condition. To a lesser degree, people hold the myth that bad parenting causes OCD. Either one is a problematic view, since it goes against the medical definition of this illness.
- 3.
- 4.
In 2020, Shiramizu began to use her real name—her maiden name—professionally “to turn over a new leaf.” Thus, her most recent works are published with the family name Kusaka, which has a root in Shinto folklore.
- 5.
Matsutani Miyoko was a well-known author of popular children’s books (e.g., Little Momo-chan 1974; Tatsunoko Taro 1978) in Japan. Shiramizu met the author in a free public lecture on yōkai. Knowing Shiramizu’s Izumo manga story, Matsutani invited her to join her team of yōkai storywriters. That children’s book became one of Matsutani’s last works before she passed away in 2015.
- 6.
Shiramizu said that Dr. Sasa had been very supportive of them through this project. As soon as she finished up her final version of Uchi no OCD, she took it over to his office and asked him to write an epilogue. Because Ashika began the CBT therapy at his clinic only after the manga had been written, there is no episode of the sessions.
- 7.
Known as “osaru no densha” (monkey train), this popular attraction began at Ueno Park in Tokyo in 1948 and continued to operate until 1974 after Japan enacted a law to protect animals, the Act on the Welfare and Management of Animals (Shirado and Aoi 2008).
- 8.
Since I teach a manga course myself, I can attest how challenging the story manga style can be to readers with limited familiarity with manga. I told her some anecdotes in which my American students find it extraordinarily difficult to understand manga titles designed in that style (e.g., Shimura Takako’s Hōrōmusuko 2010).
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Okuyama, Y. (2022). Shiramizu Sadako’s Uchi no OCD (2015): A Collaborative Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. In: Tōjisha Manga. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00840-5_9
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