Okuyama

Stigmatization and a lack of understanding of a health condition plagues people with disabilities. In the greater fight against misguided perspectives, Yoshiko Okuyama contributes with her work, Reframing Disability in Manga. She writes a textbook – style discourse about the contributions which Japanese graphic literature makes to the cause of better understanding people with differing abilities and identities.

Her topics of discussion are deafness, blindness, paraplegia, autism, and gender identity disorder thus covering the topics of sensory disorders, motor disabilities, and psychological 'disabilities'. However, before diving into these topics, she starts the book with a thorough discussion of what might be called the philosophy of etiology as it pertains to these conditions. How does society perceive and thus define these conditions? How do these perceptions fit into Japanese culture in particular? Her academic discussion lays a good foundation for a general discussion of disabilities and not at all one limited to graphic literature. What are the contemporary thoughts on designating people as 'differently abled' when they sharply diverge from the population norm vs. just 'disabled'. Her review of the semantics of the field is up to date, valuable, and mainly scholastic.

She presents a heavily bibliographic review of each condition by detailing which authors have tackled what issues. This writing mode is another way in which the book remains an academic one. From an amateur perspective, I think that I would have better appreciation for the book if it had a slightly heavier emphasis on the nuanced details of different author's artwork, itself – one citing some specific panels of a more limited number of artists. However, she does systematically give case studies for each topic, and my point is quite easy to overstate. One counter example would be her description of Wandering Son, by Shimura Takako, in which she vividly describes the action in an important work on transexuality.

Most importantly, Okuyama brings attention and focus to another medium out of which the classification of 'the other' can be rendered less powerful. Graphic literature gets scant recognition in America for its educational perspective (the genre, itself, may be stigmatized by its easy application to pornography). Okuyama empowers the reader / artist / scholar to foster greater usage and respect for it.… (mais)