For precisely this reason, Beetles, Cats, Clouds, which opened in September 2025 at NYU Steinhardt’s 80WSE gallery, feels particularly distinctive. The exhibition brings together works by three Japanese women manga artists—Tsurita Kuniko, Yamada Murasaki, and Kondoh Akino—across a wide range of media, including original drawings from their comics, sketches, illustrations, animated shorts, as well as printed books and magazines¹. It explores how, from the 1960s into the 2000s, they challenged dominant manga paradigms through gendered consciousness and narrative experimentation.

Inspired by the exhibition’s curatorial premise, this essay examines the work of three women manga artists active in Japan in the 1980s and 1990s—Takano Fumiko, Yoshida Akimi, and Okazaki Kyoko—to reconsider, from a feminist perspective grounded in East Asian women’s lived experience, the impact, significance, and potential of manga as both a mass cultural form (which has long accounted for roughly 30 to 40 percent of Japan’s publishing market) and an artistic medium.

From the late 1940s through the 1960s, the readership of postwar Japanese manga expanded beyond children to encompass a broader spectrum—boys, girls, and young adults alike—while distinct visual and narrative conventions gradually took shape for each demographic. Shōnen manga, for instance, typically centers on coming-of-age narratives, often framed through sports or adventure, whereas shōjo manga tends to focus on school life and the complexities of emotional relationships, its heroines frequently portrayed as pretty, slender bishōjo (“beautiful girl”) figures. Yet this established framework would soon begin to shift.

By the 1970s and ’80s, under the combined influence of the Japanese New Wave and European New Wave cinema, manga in Japan began to chart an anti-generic trajectory. Avant-garde magazines such as Garo and COM served as key platforms for this shift, which critics have since described as a “New Wave” in manga. Takano Fumiko stands as one of its most emblematic figures.

Born in 1957, Takano Fumiko made her debut in 1979 with the short manga “The Absolutely Safe Razor” (Zettai Anzen Kamisori). Largely self-taught, she developed a visual language at once iconoclastic and light, unbound by convention. Through deft composition and shifts in perspective, a precise handling of light, shadow, and text, and a strikingly authorial sensibility, her work reads like a New Wave film unfolding on paper—reshaping readers’ assumptions about what manga can be.

In The Power of Manga, the manga artist and critic Natsume Fusanosuke notes that Takano Fumiko’s layouts are so intricately constructed as to resist easy classification within existing genres ¹. A compelling example is “Back Straight—It’s My Turn” (1978)², collected in The Absolutely Safe Razor³. In this short work, Takano offers a finely observed portrayal of a young girl’s shifting perceptions as she encounters a range of female bodies in a public bathhouse.

The story’s protagonist is a short-haired girl who enters a public bathhouse with a rigid expression, her mind bristling with aversion. Takano layers the scene with a series of onomatopoeic cues—the clatter of footsteps, the rattle of the sliding door, the soft slap of water underfoot—heightening the girl’s mounting irritation. In the dense steam, an array of female bodies closes in from all sides, and the page conveys, with striking precision, an almost suffocating sense of pressure.

Takano then renders, with remarkable acuity, the bodies of women across different ages: from the supple, rounded lines of a young girl to the more irregular, sluggish contours of older bodies—drooping shoulders, gaunt arms, sagging breasts, the jagged scar of a C-section. One older woman hunches forward, kneeling with her legs folded beneath her, head bowed as she washes herself. Here, Takano uses screentone to cast her body into a looming shadow on the wall, as if it might at any moment engulf the girl.

These aging bodies begin to merge with the girl’s memory of her mother. She recalls that her mother bore the same C-section scar; as a younger child, she had once been held in her mother’s arms in the bath, her small feet brushing against that mark as she innocently asked where it came from. At the story’s close, Takano renders the back of an older woman: the spine sharply articulated, the shoulder blades jutting, the flesh of the hips hollowed and slack. The figure seems to address the girl—“It’s your turn.”

In this story, the women in the bathhouse remain fundamentally estranged—mere passersby in one another’s lives. Yet through the naked, unvarnished presence of their bodies, they begin to converge within the protagonist’s consciousness, tracing the arc of a life emblematic of many East Asian women. The female body, as rendered by Takano Fumiko, is at once strikingly real and strikingly rare: it departs both from the objectified bodies typical of shōnen manga and from the idealized, highly ornamental figures of shōjo manga. Within only a few pages, Takano condenses a remarkably nuanced attentiveness to the bodies of East Asian women, a deep reflection on maternal experience, and the unspoken bonds and entanglements of female solidarity, revealing a level of expressive and intellectual depth in manga no less powerful than that of any other artistic medium.

A contemporary of Takano Fumiko, Yoshida Akimi graduated from Musashino Art University and made her debut in 1977 with “A Slightly Mysterious Lodger” (Chotto Fushigi na Geshukunin). She remains active to this day. Her best-known works include Banana Fish (1985–1994) and Umimachi Diary (2006–2018).

Yoshida Akimi’s mid-length work Sakura no sono (1985–86)¹ is set in an all-girls’ high school known as “Cherry Blossom Garden.” The narrative follows four members of the school drama club as they rehearse The Cherry Orchard by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, unfolding in four acts, each from the perspective of one of four close friends. Moving beyond rehearsals, the work enters the textures of everyday school life, romantic entanglements, and family tensions, tracing the girls’ adolescent negotiations of identity, family, and emotional relationships.

Through a metatheatrical narrative, Yoshida Akimi uses the rehearsal process to externalize her characters’ inner lives, weaving together the troubles faced by four girls. Atsuko hesitates over whether to respond to her boyfriend’s sexual advances; Noriko, slapped by her father and shoved by her boyfriend, is left to wonder whether such treatment is merely the consequence of her supposed defiance; Yūko and Chiyoko must confront the nature of their feelings for one another. Alongside these central tensions, rumors and quiet malice within the girls’ world, the shame surrounding menstruation and bodily development, and the undercurrent of verbal violence within the family surface only in passing—often as fragments of everyday conversation. Yet these seemingly trivial details persist as the kind of “small, tedious things”¹ no one can quite forget, resonating deeply with readers.

In the end, The Cherry Orchard is staged at “Cherry Blossom Garden,” even as the confusions of girlhood quietly recur in the lives of those who follow. As Yoshida Akimi writes in the closing lines: “The girls gaze wistfully at the petals scattered over one another, repeating ‘I like you’ and ‘I don’t’ countless times.” For them, the cherry blossoms signify not only the fleeting nature of youth, but also the discipline imposed by a patriarchal order.

Compared with Takano Fumiko’s narratives, which emerge from intensely personal experience and observation, Yoshida Akimi excels at portraying the intricate forms of intimacy, solidarity, and tension that arise within communities. In Sakura no Sono, girls are bound not only by idealized kindness and empathy, but also by misunderstanding and jealousy. It is within these dense and deeply human webs of interaction that, amid the growing pains of adolescence, they begin to sense the pressures exerted upon them by larger social structures.

From the late 1980s into the early 1990s, Japan slipped rapidly from the heights of economic prosperity into the deep recession that followed the bursting of the Japanese bubble economy, undergoing a profound historical rupture. In Precarious Japan (2013), the cultural anthropologist Anne Allison examines how, amid prolonged economic stagnation, precarious labor, the specter of nuclear contamination, and demographic decline, Japanese society has continued to operate under conditions of uncertainty and anxiety. Moving between social structures and lived experience, she describes a condition marked by a loss of a sense of home—not only in the literal sense of displacement, but as an erosion of belonging and a fraying of social ties. In the cultural sphere, the post-bubble era likewise brought about a critical reckoning with the excesses and illusions of earlier consumerism. Manga, too, became a medium through which such reflections found expression. The work of the manga artist Okazaki Kyoko offers a telling example.

Born in 1963 in Tokyo’s Shimokitazawa district, Okazaki Kyoko is best known for works such as Pink (1989), River’s Edge (1993–94), and Helter Skelter (1995–96). Her work depicts the everyday lives of women struggling to survive in the city, laying bare their restlessness and unease with unflinching candor. In Pink¹, Okazaki takes “love and capitalism” as her central theme, sketching the life of Yumi, a Tokyo girl living in the afterglow of the Japanese bubble era. By day, she is an office worker; by night, she works as a call girl, using her earnings to keep a pet crocodile—a creature that comes to embody her desire and solitude. In River’s Edge², adolescence—figured through the lives of high school students—is stripped of its usual brightness, giving way to a prolonged dull ache and a slow, creeping decay. Riverbanks, corpses, raging fire, same-sex desire, and acts of bullying and violence interweave into a stark tableau of post-bubble Japan.

Okazaki Kyoko often sketches her figures in spare, economical lines, and deftly deploys shot–reverse-shot framing to heighten moments of conflict and confrontation. Her urban settings, by contrast, take shape through dense screentone and expanses of shadow, lending them a stark, almost austere quality. When the narrative turns inward, the panels are engulfed in black, leaving only text and a faint, light-tinged mesh of plant shadows catching what little light remains—like a fragile pulse of life flickering within the city’s dark undercurrent¹.

As the sweetness of an era fades, the once-familiar coming-of-age narratives—stories in which young people dream of leaving for the metropolis and making something of themselves¹—begin to run aground. The buoyant promise that effort will be rewarded with good fortune dissipates. Confronted with a raw and unvarnished reality, caught between indifference and desire, girls and boys alike persist in a kind of stubborn defiance even as they stumble and fall. In the work of Okazaki Kyoko, this takes shape as an unassuming yet unflinching battlefield of the everyday.

The work of Takano Fumiko, Yoshida Akimi, and Okazaki Kyoko reveals the multiple trajectories through which women’s manga, grounded in private experience, open outward toward social critique. Departing from the sweet, dreamlike fantasies of conventional shōjo manga, their work traces, at the moment of the bubble economy’s rise and collapse, the subtle reconfigurations of female subjectivity within the interstices of individual life, family, and society. It is precisely this sustained engagement with lived experience, in constant dialogue with social reality, that makes women’s manga of the 1980s and ’90s a vital lens through which to understand the psychological and cultural transformations of Japan from postwar affluence to the post-bubble era.

Today, so-called “anti-genre manga” has become an indispensable voice in contemporary manga, continually expanding the boundaries of the medium itself. Many women manga artists have likewise played an important role in this development. Mori Kaoru, for instance, weaves together meticulous historical research and delicate imagination to depict everyday life in nineteenth-century England and Central Asia. Ichikawa Haruko, meanwhile, builds entire cosmologies around inorganic gemstones, using a highly abstract visual language to explore philosophical questions. Artists such as panpanya and mississippi have chosen to obscure their identities altogether, while their works quietly blur the boundaries of gender. Taken together, these practices reveal a worldview defined by openness and inclusivity, one that positions manga as an artistic practice grounded in the uneven textures of lived experience and emotional expression, while also foregrounding its critical potential to engage with reality and attune itself to the spirit of its time. (Editor: Ara Yun Qiu; Translator: Yi Yu)