Gender Roles

I’m conflicted about how to feel about Good-bye. The manga deals with topics a lot darker than we have seen so far in class and raises a lot of interesting questions about morality. It presents a hard look at life and is unafraid to show a rather grime outlook of the world. What I like about Tatsumi’s manga is how it’s willing to be ambiguous rather than just spoon feed the audience a message and tell the audience how to feel, like many of the Crime SuspenStories comics do. While certainly provocative, my main issue that makes me question these manga is the very limited view of manhood. Over and over again we see these male characters who look at women as just sex objects or annoyances that nag you. Particularly in “Just a Man,” I’m not sure if Tatsumi’s goal is to have us sympathize for these male characters who are frankly really creepy. This is especially evident in Mr. Hanayama from “Just a Man” who uses women to get back at his wife.

Why I’m not quick to completely dismiss these manga as championing a really unhealthy view of manhood is because this way of thinking never actually brings any of the characters joy in the end. So in that respect I could see these manga as being a sharp criticism of toxic masculinity and the effects it has on both men and women. Between these two ways of looking at manhood in the manga, I lean towards the idea that Tatsumi’s work highlights how harmful it is when men only are valued for their strength and whether they can attract women while women are only prized for their beauty. In “Woman in the Mirror” the idea that a man might want to be more like a woman is seen as sickening by the narrator who throws up when he catches Ikeuchi in women’s clothing. Ikeuchi’s struggle with his identity shows how confining gender roles can be and the narrator’s reaction to Ikeuchi’s appearance shows how society and the views of outsiders pressure us into the confining boxes of our sex.