Reading this manga made me feel as if I’d been granted exclusive entry into an important emotional space. Plenty of series are autobiographical and reflective. Very few manage to convey the depth and severity of emotion in entire volumes that Until I Love Myself does in a matter of a few pages. Xgender author Poppy Pesuyama is incredibly direct in their storytelling, both in terms of their own retrospective thoughts and the things they experience in the present. The raw style makes every event feel as immediate and unyielding as actual life tends to be; I felt like I was right beside them through every step of their recounted life.
Until I Love Myself volume 1 focuses principally on Pesuyama’s journey through adolescence, moving up the different grades in school, finding themselves socially, entering the workforce, and attempting to reconcile the various elements of their gender identity and gender expression. Those elements are both social and physical; a critical part of the volume (and the explicit premise of one of its chapters) is learning to offer grace and forgiveness to the body one is born in. In Pesuyama’s case, that body is one that, because of how it is perceived, causes intense social dysphoria. There isn’t any single absolutely right way to deal with that, confront those who cause it, or avoid it. The story tracks how Pesuyama lives and survives through it, becoming more and more themselves in the process. As with any autobiographical work, working through true events, especially those that relate to personal pain, is hard. Pesuyama does it with incredible care and quality.
A quick content warning: the manga, and thus also this article, discuss gender dysphoria, eating disorders, self harm, sexual harassment, and misgendering. Read on with that in mind.
The event(s) that connect the past and present of Pesuyama’s life, as well as form a lot of inspiration for the manga, is the workplace harassment, much of it sexual and nearly all of it gendered, they went through roughly seven years ago. An anonymized manga artist in his mid-30s (named simply “X”) hires Pesuyama as an assistant (specifically, a digital apprentice) through some mutual editorial connections they both had in the space. Pesuyama (by my rough relative calculations) is in their lower-20s at this point and relatively new to the industry. X takes advantage of this hierarchy immediately. X immediately constructs an innocent, feminine persona and thrusts it upon Pesuyama, calling them “Poppy-chan,” referring to them as a girl with a toxic precision that feels surgical, and overriding anything they do say about their own preferences and gender identity with comments to the contrary. Even more, the work environment X creates is overtly sexual and boorish; there are only a few people working in a room on the second floor of an apartment building side-by-side and X constantly regales them all with comments that feel straight out of a middle school boys’ locker room. X tells dirty jokes and makes outlandish sexual comments seemingly to test Pesuyama’s boundaries.
Any negative response by them reinforces the presupposed identity as a “purehearted maiden.” Any positive response causes X to pivot his assumption completely, asserting that Pesuyama instead must be a sex-obsessed nymphomaniac. This meant the best, though still painful, option was to ignore the comments and suffer on a daily basis while coworkers either laugh with X or sit in silence. Unfortunately, none of these options stop the behavior or slow its ramp up.
Without spoiling the finer details of the story (I think it’s worth experiencing it with Pesuyama’s careful and personal delivery), X’s talking turns to touching and become increasingly unbearable to Pesuyama to the point where they slam themselves into walls and burst into fits of rage or strange noises to try and cope. In the years following their time working for X, we see the lingering effects of dealing with pain and stress for so long. We also get a look into key moments from adolescence that serve as building blocks for Pesuyama’s gender presentation and way of thinking, creating key periods in life that serve as focal origins of trauma. The manga showcases the emotional turmoil of struggling to reconcile one’s own agency with the reality of the horrible power people may have over them — for example, the fact that while you can in theory walk out of a job at any moment, it’s not a simple matter to do so and risk your career, wages, and livelihood. The harassment took place in 2013 and the manga was written close to 2020. This meant that a large part of Pesuyama’s processing of their experiences, and the options they have for recourse later on, are colored by the prominence of the #MeToo movement and the frustration of feeling like a route to safety came years too late.
By far the most striking and noteworthy aspect of Pesuyama’s art style is the way they opt to draw themselves. Until I Love Myself depicts its protagonist in terms of their emotions, a quality I’ve definitely seen in other autobiographical manga but not quite in this unique way. Rather than simply come from a character on the page, those emotions act like an additional layer to the artwork and an element all their own. In practice, this leads to feelings like “made my skin crawl” having direct illustrations that perfectly convey the emotion in question far more than a straightforward retelling of events ever could. This serves to add depth to the story that I don’t think I’ve read or watched almost anywhere else. Not only is it more powerful than hearing a character’s thoughts, but it also works alongside that technique for an even stronger personal display.
On top of that, lesser-understood aspects of the mind feel clearly displayed in this manga. Dissociation, tonic immobility, and negative self talk each have their own stylistic depictions in Until I Love Myself. Those depictions start feeling like familiar symbols on a map after only a few uses, allowing Pesuyama to make full use of a panel while expressing a complicated, but frequent, emotion. I found this quite impressive and I think it’s a subtlety many, many manga would do well to learn from.
I think this is a story that everyone needs to read. At a time when the work conditions of manga artists are a common topic on social media, I think it’s worth understanding the portions of that that aren’t just long hours or low pay. The socially abusive practices exposed within the #MeToo movement tend to be assumed as things just endemic to corporate settings and office jobs — clearly that isn’t the case. In a broader sense, I think autobiographical manga are an underrated storytelling vehicle. Manga as good as Until I Love Myself are proof enough of how valuable it is, but I believe manga’s style of paneling, publication formats, and black-and-white printing (limiting the need for color pages) make it a strong artform for personal expression.
Pesuyama’s story also is one that, from a queer perspective, deserves to be heard and informs a lot about an oft-disregarded segment of the population. They tell their story in a way that is accessible to anyone. Even the portions talking about very heavy topics are never overly gratuitous. I read the manga in two sittings and that was only because I had to transfer trains between the two of them. Especially as we move through Pride month, this is a manga you absolutely need to check out.
Until I Love Myself, Vol. 1: The Journey of a Nonbinary Manga Artist will be released on June 20, 2023. You can check out the website under the Viz Signature label here, pre-order here, and watch the manga trailer here.
JIBUN NO KARADA O YURUSU MADE © 2021 Poppy PESUYAMA/SHOGAKUKAN
Anime Corner received a review copy of this manga.