My Picture Diary

The wife of Japan s most lauded manga-ka documents a year in their lives with her own artistry. In 1981, Fujiwara Maki began a picture diary about daily life with her son and husband, the legendary manga author Tsuge Yoshiharu. Publishing was not her original intention. I wanted to record our family s daily life while our son, Shosuke, was small. But as 8mm cameras were too expensive and we were poor, I decided on the picture diary format instead. I figured Shosuke would enjoy reading it when he got older. Drawn in a simple, personable style, and covering the same years fictionalized in Tsuge s final masterpiece The Man Without Talent, Fujiwara s journal focuses on the joys of daily life amidst the stresses of childrearing, housekeeping, and managing a depressed husband. A touching and inspiring testimony of one Japanese woman's resilience, My Picture Diary is also an important glimpse of the enigma that is Tsuge. Fujiwara s diary is unsparing. It provides a stark picture of the gender divide in their household: Tsuge sleeps until noon and does practically nothing. He never compliments her cooking, and dictates how money is spent. Not once is he shown drawing. And yet Fujiwara remains surprisingly empathetic toward her mercurial husband. Translated by Ryan Holmberg, this edition sheds light on Fujiwara's life, her own career in art, writing, and underground theater, and her extensive influence upon her husband's celebrated manga.

Fujiwara Maki (1941 1999) was an artist, actress, and writer. After growing up poor during and after World War II, Fujiwara moved to Tokyo in the 1960s and became a leading actress in the underground theater scene. In 1969, she met the manga artist Tsuge Yoshiharu; they got married after their son, Shosuke, was born in 1975. She began drawing and writing in the early 1980s, completing her first and best-known work, My Picture Diary, in 1982. Her other publications include the children s book Guess What Kind of Shop This Is (1985) and the painting collection Candy Store (1994). After cameoing in movie adaptations of Tsuge s manga in the early 1990s, Fujiwara died of cancer at the age of fifty-seven.