![]() ![]() Nagata takes great pains to deliver her story in detail: she explains the entire chronology of working her way into becoming a manga artist, including details of the tasks she had at various bakery jobs, her personal hygiene and sleeping habits, compulsions including eating disorders and cutting, histories of relationships with each immediate family member, etc. My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness itself may suffer a similar issue: in an almost desperate attempt to assemble all the blocks of Kabi’s story, the comic displaces its own need to find aesthetic purpose. For Kabi, it’s less about experiencing the sensations of a sexual encounter with another person, and more about driving herself to have checked off certain notches in a sexual narrative (i.e., was I kissed, was I embraced, was I penetrated?). Kabi’s wires crossing also causes her to project an artificial intimacy on the titular encounter, which ultimately leaves her overwhelmed and uncertain of how to process the exchange. The book traces themes of emotional distancing in Kabi’s life, primarily her abstinence from most social interaction and sexual expression, as she arguably displaces the drive for intimacy into pursuing her ambition of becoming a manga artist. ![]() Kabi Nagata’s My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness follows the painfully shy, socially anxious narrator Kabi through her first sexual encounter at age 28, for which she hires a female sex worker to meet her in a love (or short-stay) hotel. ![]()
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