Until I Love Myself, Volume 1

June 5, 2023
Cute, inviting artwork and a friendly narrative voice ease manga readers into this fearless and often harrowing memoir. Pesuyama, drawn as a cartoony figure with a pageboy haircut and deeply shadowed eyes, endures relentless sexual harassment while working as an art assistant to a manga creator identified as “X.” The pressure-cooker atmosphere of a manga studio, where the art team works 15-hour days and sleeps and showers in the office, provides plenty of opportunities for predatory behavior. “The rowdy kid in class was stomping bugs, and everyone else was just watching,” Pesuyama recalls. Seven years later, as the #MeToo movement triggers a shift in Japanese attitudes toward sexual harassment, Pesuyama confronts their trauma and delves into the childhood experiences that shaped their complex experience of gender. The script leaps from one weighty issue to another, with Pesuyama exploring sexuality, gender identity, and the visceral pain of violation. The loose, accessible linework turns frantic and jagged when Pesuyama depicts their internal anxieties. Brutally direct yet intimate and unpretentious, this comes across like a revealing conversation with a close friend.

July 1, 2023
Grades 11-12 An unflinching memoir of the mangaka's experience of workplace harassment as a nonbinary creator, this is an incredible reflection on identity and trauma. When Pesuyama is offered the chance to assist manga artist X, they are excited about the opportunity. But X refuses to acknowledge their nonbinary identity, first forcing femininity upon them and then escalating to more degrading humiliation. The experience leaves Pesuyama traumatized, and their life is impacted for years, as they lash out against the experience, their past, their family and friends, and the female gender they were assigned at birth. This first volume is the beginning of Pesuyama's journey to self-acceptance. Reminiscent of Nagata Kabi's My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness (2017) and My Alcoholic Escape from Reality (2021), Pesuyama's honesty about their struggles with gender identity and the shame and humiliation they felt upon being harassed by the mangaka they were assisting earlier in their career is unsparing. Their story is necessary on multiple levels, and the reader cannot help but connect with them.

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