Content Warnings: Discussion of disordered eating and trauma
For many queer, marginalized manga readers, the name Nagata Kabi rings an immediate bell. Whether it’s her first title, My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, her Solo Exchange Diary duology, her musings on alcoholism and marriage in separate, consecutive entries, or most recently, My Pancreas Broke, but My Life Got Better, Nagata’s autobiographical works capture contemporary life with an unflinching honesty that has resonated across her audience. This is certainly true for myself and that last title.
My Pancreas Broke, but My Life Got Better is a bit of a time capsule, capturing how it felt to be sick in Japan’s emergent COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a pandemic that I had a unique perspective of as I was living in Fukushima when, in March 2020, the country shut down. I would go on to live within that pandemic until I immigrated back to the United States on August 11, 2020, where I would be faced with the jarring dissonance between Japan’s health care system and America’s tendency towards capitalistic cruelty.
While a distinctly different view on the pandemic, Nagata Kabi’s sixth autobiographical entry resonates with my own story as it captures the confusion and mundane chaos of suddenly living in a society that seems to be falling apart at the seams. Simultaneously, it details what happens when your body breaks while the world is just… kind of falling apart. It’s a story—a true narrative—about what happens when your life falls apart and you can no longer escape
That last bit is what this article is about: falling apart.