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Diane R. Wiener interviewed Yu Taguchi for Wordgathering.
Content Warning: References to murder, sexual exploitation, family violence, infanticide, abortion, “the curse” of an aborted fetus, and metaphorical depictions of confinement as experienced by a person living with dementia.
WG: You mentioned during an earlier interaction we shared that there is “an entire world of Japanese manga that deals with disability and its gray zones in ways that most English-speaking audiences have never encountered.” You then provided some examples, including “manga that explore stories such as: a family’s anguish when a loved one’s long-term hikikomori (social withdrawal) leads to the discovery of an underlying disability; or a woman working in the nightlife industry who has [an] intellectual disability and falls through the cracks of the support system, becoming invisible to society.” You asserted, “These works go far beyond the ‘inspiration’ narrative — they confront structural failures, family trauma, and the blurred boundaries between disability and so-called ‘normality’ with extraordinary honesty and artistic power.”
As we embark upon our new adventures, I want to start by thanking you enthusiastically for the opportunity to engage in ongoing conversation! In the nearly six years since the publication of Yoshiko Okuyama’s Reframing Disability in Manga, what has surprised, intrigued, and flummoxed you the most in the Japanese Disability Manga Landscape?
YT: Thank you for this question — and for the title, which I love.
What has surprised me most about the Japanese disability manga landscape since Okuyama’s study is not a new genre or a new set of titles. It is an aesthetic principle that her framework — necessarily, and through no fault of her own — could not quite capture. Okuyama organized her analysis around five recognized disability categories. That was rigorous and valuable work. But the most powerful manga emerging now are doing something different: they refuse to name the condition at their center. And I believe this refusal is not a gap in representation. It is the representation.
This has roots deeper than manga. Japanese mythology does not operate in moral binaries. In the Hiruko story, Izanagi and Izanami are not condemned as wicked parents. Hiruko is not framed as a pitiful victim. The narrative holds space without assigning blame — and it is precisely this absence of judgment that allowed my son to find himself in the story and choose his own ending. The myth does not tell you what to feel. It gives you room.
I see the same principle at work in the manga I review and report on. The Illness with No Name announces its refusal to diagnose in the title itself. Mii-chan and Yamada-san follows a young woman in a Shinjuku hostess club whom the author has deliberately left undiagnosed: “What kind of person Mii-chan is, I leave to the reader.” And The World as Seen Through Dementia, a manga I created the original story for, does not judge who is right — the caregiver or the person with dementia. It simply shows how the world feels from inside a mind that is changing. In Japanese aesthetics, this is called yohaku — the white space, the emptiness that carries meaning. The reader is trusted to enter the gap and bring their own understanding.
But I would be dishonest if I described this only as an aesthetic insight. I understood it first as a mother.
When my son was small, I took him to a public developmental support center. His disability was mild — what we call in Japan a “gray zone.” He didn’t fit neatly into any program. A staff member told me: “You’re his mother, so of course you’ll quit your job.” Not as a suggestion. As a settled fact.
That sentence did not come from nowhere. It came from what I call Japan’s other mythology — the myth of motherhood. During the postwar economic miracle, Japanese society constructed a story in which the husband earns and the wife guards the home, and the mother’s love is limitless and unconditional. This story is perhaps sixty or seventy years old. It is a modern invention dressed up as eternal truth — almost a secular religion. And yet it is this myth, not the ancient ones, that has the most power over the lives of mothers raising children with disabilities in Japan today. The Hiruko myth is 1,300 years old. It does not judge. The motherhood myth is barely two generations old. It judges everything.
I didn’t quit. I became a writer instead — precisely because it was work I could do remotely, on my own hours, while raising my son. And as I connected with support networks and adults living with developmental disabilities, I discovered how many people exist in that same gray zone — too different for the mainstream, not different enough for the system to see.
That is the territory these manga are mapping. Not disability as a classification, but ikizurasa — a word that means something close to “the pain of being alive in a world that has no category for your suffering.” Okuyama gave English-language readers a taxonomy. The manga I work with are giving readers something else: a space where the name doesn’t matter, and the judgment is yours.
WG: Thank you, Yu, for your thoughtful, kind, candid, and robust reflections. If I understand, it seems you are thinking about the idea of a “gray zone” as a nuanced, fraught, interstitial or liminal locus. I find this approach both compelling and complicated. I would like to encourage further “diving” into this locus and learning more about your interpretations and understandings of the “gray zone”‘s power and potential. I am also aware that neither of us wish to romanticize or idealize a liminal locus such as the “gray zone”…at least that is the impression I have of our shared and overlapping understandings and commitments.
Interestingly, “gray zone” is also an idiom of war or its predecessors, in some cultures’ linear timelines. I was also struck in your comments by a parallel across so-called “cold war” time. Specifically, I was reminded of the ways in which I learned from my friend and mentor, Dr. Elizabeth G. Harrison, about how Mizuko Kuyō is depicted in manga. Images of motherhood, fatherhood, and parenting more broadly (including cultural tropes related to Mizuko Kuyō) in manga and elsewhere (as described, for example, in Dr. Helen Hardacre’s Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan), when formed into a kind of Venn Diagram–overlapping with manga images / representations of disablement inside of the “gray zone”– seem replete with representational possibility. Can you comment more on the “gray zone” and your (not idealized) “hopes” for its power and potential in these respects?
YT: Thank you for this question — and for bringing Mizuko Kuyō into the conversation. I do not mind at all. In fact, I think it belongs here.
Let me start with what the gray zone actually looks like on the ground in Japan, because I don’t want to talk about its “power and potential” without first being honest about its cost.
Before the 1970s, Japan defined intellectual disability as an IQ below 85. When the threshold was lowered to 70, everyone between 71 and 84 lost their label. This was not liberation. It was erasure. Their difficulties didn’t disappear — only their eligibility for support did. Today, these individuals exist in what Japan calls the “gray zone”: too different for the mainstream, not different enough for the system to see. And this is not unique to intellectual disability. Wherever the system mistakes the absence of visible failure for the absence of suffering — in depression, in autism, in ADHD — the same gray zone opens, and the same people fall through.
The gray zone is a place of double exclusion. The disability community says, “You’re not one of us.” The non-disabled world says, “Something is off about you.” There is no camp, no flag, no community that claims them. And without a label, the safety net has no hook to catch them. They fall — into poverty, into exploitation, into the sex industry, into crime. In Mii-chan and Yamada-san, the manga I proposed for the review series, a young woman with no diagnosis works in a Shinjuku hostess club. She is cheerful, eager, and “just a little bit off.” The manga follows the twelve months leading to her murder. This is not a hypothetical. This is the gray zone’s price.
So I want to be clear: I do not romanticize this place. Anyone who has watched someone fall through the gap between “disabled” and “normal” knows there is nothing romantic about it.
But you asked about its power and potential, and I owe you an honest answer.
Here is what I have come to understand — first as a mother, then as a journalist, and now, writing to you, as something I can finally articulate.
The gray zone’s power is not in the zone itself. It is in what happens when someone chooses to depict it without resolving it.
Japan’s diagnostic system draws a line and says: above this line, you are normal; below it, you are disabled. The line creates clarity. It also creates invisibility. Everyone the line doesn’t touch ceases to exist in the eyes of the institution.
Manga does not draw lines. The creator of Mii-chan and Yamada-san said: “What kind of person Mii-chan is, I leave to the reader.” That is not evasion. That is the only method of representation that can make visible what the system has made invisible. You cannot name the gray zone into existence with a diagnosis — because the absence of diagnosis is the very thing that defines it. You can only show a human being, without label, without judgment, and trust the reader to see.
This is the deeper layer of what I called yohaku in my previous answer. In Question 1, I described yohaku as the refusal to name. Here, I want to say something more: that refusal is not merely aesthetic. It is the only representational strategy that works for the gray zone, because any label — even a well-intentioned one — would push the person out of the gray zone and into a category, which is precisely the violence the gray zone enacts in the first place.
Now — Mizuko Kuyō.
You were right to bring it here, because it follows the same structure.
Mizuko Kuyō, in its original form, was a ritual without judgment. In the Edo period, children were said to belong to the gods until the age of seven. Infanticide and abortion were realities of poverty, not moral failings. Mizuko Kuyō was grief — simply grief. A way to mourn a child who could not stay.
Then, in the 1970s — as Dr. Hardacre has documented — the ritual was commercialized and politicized. Temples and spiritual entrepreneurs began selling the idea of tatari: the curse of the aborted fetus. Women were told their suffering was punishment. Guilt became an industry. A ritual that had existed without moral judgment for centuries was overwritten with a modern morality that turned mothers into sinners.
This is the same structure I described in Question 1. The Hiruko myth is 1,300 years old. It does not judge. The motherhood myth is barely two generations old. It judges everything. And Mizuko Kuyō sits at their intersection: an ancient practice of grief, hijacked by a modern machinery of blame.
What I see across all of these — the gray zone, Mizuko Kuyō, the motherhood myth, and the Hiruko story — is a single pattern: a space that originally held no moral judgment is colonized, after the fact, by a binary that sorts people into worthy and unworthy. The diagnostic line that separates “disabled” from “normal.” The moral line that separates “good mother” from “bad mother.” The religious line that separates “grieved properly” from “cursed.” These lines are not ancient. They are imposed. And they are the source of exclusion — not the conditions they claim to describe.
Your Venn diagram is right: the circles of parenthood and disability overlap, and that overlap is the gray zone. It is where every imposed binary breaks down, and where the real human experience — unnameable, unjudgeable, alive — actually lives.
And here is where I believe manga’s power becomes something more than aesthetic. Japanese manga, at its deepest, operates on what I think of as the logic of in-yō — the yin-yang. Not the Western separation of good and evil, but their mutual inclusion. Good contains evil. Evil contains good. Neither is pure. In The Illness with No Name, the eldest brother is a man who once attacked his family with a kitchen knife — and who spends his last hundred yen buying toys for his nieces and nephews. The manga artist Miyakawa said in our interview: “Mazinger Z has clear good-versus-evil lines. But Gundam forces you to confront the reality that both sides have a point. I want to draw my brother that way.” He is not excusing violence. He is refusing to let a binary consume a human being.
In a world governed by binaries — disabled or normal, good mother or bad mother, grieved or cursed — the gray zone is a place of suffering. But in a world governed by in-yō, where opposites contain each other, the gray zone is simply where humans actually live. Manga can hold that complexity because it inherits a narrative tradition that never required moral purity in the first place.
And yet I want to be careful here, because I do not believe manga’s power is simply one of acceptance — of saying “you belong here and that is enough.” When manga depicts a gray-zone life without naming it, without judging it, without resolving it, it is doing something more confrontational than comfort. It is saying: “This person is here. What do you make of that?” The white space — yohaku — is not an embrace. It is where the reader’s own thinking begins. And a question that arises inside the reader is harder to dismiss than any argument imposed from outside.
This brings me to the question of activism, which I think lives inside your question even if you did not name it directly.
Disability activism was necessary. It won barrier-free access, legal rights, and international conventions. It was a fight, and the fight was right. But a fight, by its nature, creates sides — and people who have been told what to think eventually stop listening.
I learned this not from theory, but from my own platform. When I was running Aideal Hiroba, a contributor with cerebral palsy wrote something that stopped me in my tracks. He argued that the era of “fighting against the non-disabled” was over — that the confrontational model of disability activism, while necessary in its time, now pushed potential allies away. His proposal was not surrender. It was a shift: from “winning rights from the other side” to “creating something together.” He wrote: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Reading his words, I realized — this is the path to coexistence. Not a battle between the disabled and the non-disabled, but a shared project.
The gray zone is full of people whom activism, in its confrontational form, cannot reach — not because activism failed, but because they have no label to rally under, no category to claim rights through. They are invisible to the movement for the same reason they are invisible to the system: they do not fit.
Manga and journalism offer a different entry point. Not a replacement for activism, but a different door — the door my contributor was describing. When manga shows a gray-zone life honestly, it does not tell the reader which side to take. It does not create enemies. It simply places a human being in front of you and lets the question form on its own. Activism says, “The system must change.” Manga and journalism say, “Here is what is real.” Both are necessary. But in a world growing tired of being told what to think, the second may reach people the first cannot — and in doing so, it may move the very systems that activism alone could not move, precisely because no one told the reader what to conclude.
That is my honest, unidealized hope for the gray zone’s power. Not the place itself — the place is painful, and I will not pretend otherwise. The power is in the act of depicting it: without label, without judgment, without resolution. In the tradition of in-yō, where nothing is purely one thing. In the space of yohaku, where the reader’s own conscience begins to work.
And perhaps — if enough readers enter that white space and sit with what they find there — the lines themselves will begin to move.
WG: Thank you for your vibrant and deep responses, yet again, Yu. I have many, many feelings and reflections. I will bring just two to bear in my responses here.
The phrasing and gravity of your comment, “Manga does not draw lines,” is a great title. Maybe that is what we can call our ongoing endeavor regarding “Japan’s Disability Manga Landscape,” and how we proceed with presenting and thus sharing your works in English and Japanese for a global audience. Just a thought. The idea that manga, literally drawn with lines, does not draw lines, is a statement of liminality, its own kind of gray zone, it seems to me.
In this new Year of the Fire Horse, a year (in)famously associated in some people’s imaginations (in the past…or still…?) with dread, particularly with regard to the birth of female children who were understood to be unmarriageable, dangerous, and fearsome in their presumed non-normative presentation, and so soon, now, after the 36th anniversary of “the Capitol Crawl” (March 12, 1990), advocating for the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, what ideas do you have to encourage readers, as you said, to trust themselves in finding meaning in the mess of the gray zone’s brutal truths? What ideas do you have for creators, perhaps to signal (?) and support their readers in finding what you refer to as conscience in reading and viewing practices? Thank you again, so much.
YT: Thank you — and thank you for the title. “Manga Does Not Draw Lines” is exactly right, and I would be honored if it became the name of our ongoing endeavor. You saw something in that sentence I hadn’t fully seen myself: that manga, literally drawn with lines, does not draw lines. That contradiction is the gray zone in a single phrase.
Before I answer your question, I want to correct something I said in my previous response. I used the word “conscience” to describe what awakens in the reader when they enter the white space. I now think that was imprecise — and the imprecision matters.
When we encounter someone who does not fit our expectations — a man shouting on a bus, a woman living in a garbage-filled house, Mii-chan in the hostess club, Miyakawa’s brother with the kitchen knife — three things can happen.
Instinct says, “That person is a monster who has nothing to do with my life.” Conscience tries to correct this by saying, “That person is pitiful” or “How brave” — and in doing so, produces exactly what Stella Young called “inspiration porn.” Imagination says something different altogether: “That person has a life I have not lived.”
Instinct excludes. Conscience consumes. Only imagination connects.
The entire argument I have been building across these answers is that the imposition of moral binaries is itself the source of exclusion. If manga’s power lies in refusing to judge, then the response it seeks from the reader cannot be judgment either — not the judgment of instinct, and not the judgment of conscience. It must be imagination.
Wordgathering has explicitly rejected the model of inspiration porn. So must I. Imagination does not offer the reader a comfortable exit. It does not let them feel good about feeling bad for someone. It places them inside another human being’s reality and leaves them there.
Now to your questions.
You asked what ideas I have to encourage readers to trust themselves in finding meaning in the gray zone’s brutal truths.
I will be honest: I believe discrimination against people with disabilities will not disappear. Human beings are wired, at an instinctive level, to fear what is unfamiliar, to recoil from what does not fit their expectations. I do not think manga or journalism can eliminate that. To claim otherwise would be the kind of idealization you asked me to avoid.
But I do believe in hooks.
When I write an article, I am not trying to change anyone’s beliefs. I am trying to place a hook in their imagination. The next time they see someone shouting on a bus, or learn that their neighbor lives in a garbage-filled house, I want them to hesitate — just for a moment — before concluding that this person is a monster. I want them to think: this person has a history. This person has a life. I read about someone like this once, and the story was not what I expected.
That hesitation is not justice. It is not equality. It is not the end of discrimination. But it is the beginning of imagination. And imagination, once activated, is very difficult to shut down. You cannot un-imagine someone’s humanity once you have glimpsed it.
This is what I mean by trusting the reader. I do not tell them what to feel. I do not tell them what to conclude. I show them what is real and trust that they are capable of sitting with it. This trust is not optimism. It is a method. It is the same method the manga creators I work with are practicing when they refuse to diagnose their characters, when they leave the judgment to the reader, when they hold the white space open.
Your mention of the Year of the Fire Horse struck me, because it is another perfect example of the pattern we have been tracing. The hinoe-uma superstition — that girls born in the Year of the Fire Horse are dangerous, unmarriageable, destined to bring ruin — is a binary imposed after the fact onto a calendrical cycle that carries no inherent moral content. In 1966, the last Year of the Fire Horse, Japan’s birth rate dropped sharply because families feared having daughters in that year. A superstition — a line drawn where no line existed — altered the demographic reality of an entire nation. The Fire Horse myth is not ancient fate. It is a story people chose to believe. And it sorted women into worthy and unworthy, just as the diagnostic line sorts people into disabled and normal, just as the commercialized Mizuko Kuyō sorted mothers into grieved and cursed.
And your mention of the Capitol Crawl is equally important. Those activists crawling up the steps of the Capitol in 1990 were doing something that could not be ignored. They made their bodies visible in a space designed to exclude them. That was necessary. That was right. But the Capitol Crawl worked because it was not an argument. It was an image. It placed human beings in front of viewers and let the viewers’ own imaginations do the rest. In that sense, the Capitol Crawl was itself a kind of yohaku — a moment where no one told the audience what to think, and the audience could not look away.
So to your second question — what ideas I have for creators.
I think the most important thing a creator can do is resist the pressure to resolve. The pressure comes from everywhere: from editors who want a clear message, from readers who want comfort, from the market that rewards inspiration. The creator’s job, when depicting the gray zone, is to hold the space open. To show the human being without explaining them. To trust that the reader’s imagination will do what no label, no diagnosis, no moral framework can do — which is to recognize another person as real.
When I interview someone, I face them as one human being to another. Not from above, not from below. And the reader, through my eyes, lives through that person’s life — enters the world of someone they would never otherwise have met. That is where imagination begins to move.
The best manga does the same thing. The creator faces the character as a human being, and the reader, through the creator’s lines, enters a life they did not know existed. No explanation. No judgment. Just the experience of being inside someone else’s reality for a while.
If I have one hope for “Manga Does Not Draw Lines,” it is this: that each work we share, each review, each conversation, becomes one more hook in one more reader’s imagination. Not a campaign. Not a movement. Just a steady accumulation of moments where someone thinks, “I had not imagined that before.”
That may not be enough to change the world. But it is enough to change the next encounter. And encounters, accumulated, are how the world actually changes.
WG: My goodness. I think we can pause here. I wonder if we might plan an interview once a year, reflecting on “how it’s going,” etc. Just a thought.
By the way, I was born in 1966. Consequently, I will turn 60 this year (in June, shortly before this interview “goes live”) and I am a fire horse. I have worn this identity as a form of personal pride all of my adult life.
Thank you for joining me in this conversation. I am deeply grateful.
YT: Thank you for telling me you are a Fire Horse. I did not know — and now the entire conversation we just had reads differently, and more deeply, knowing that.
You asked me about the gray zone, about lines that are drawn where none should exist, about the power of refusing to name and refusing to judge. And you were speaking, at least in part, from inside the experience. You have worn a label that was meant to diminish you, and turned it into pride. That is not theory. That is life.
I would be honored to continue this conversation once a year. There will always be more to say — more manga to share, more gray zones to map, more lines that need not be drawn.
Thank you for this shore, Diane. I washed up, and you said, “You’re here now. That’s enough.”
Read Creative Nonfiction by Yu Taguchi as well as an entry in the new ongoing section, “Manga Does Not Draw Lines,” featuring an interview with Kosuke Sakamoto on Walking in the World of Dementia (認知症が見る世界) published by Takeshobo (竹書房).
Back to Top of Page | Back to Japan’s Disability Manga Landscape | Back to Volume 20, Issue 1 – Summer 2026
About Yu Taguchi
Yu Taguchi is a welfare journalist based in Tokyo, Japan. The original story creator of the published manga, The World as Seen by Dementia (Takeshobo, 2023), she has contributed over 50 articles on disability, caregiving, and social welfare to major Japanese publications including Bunshun Online (文春オンライン), Nikkan SPA!, and Shueisha Online (集英社オンライン). She founded and served as editor-in-chief of “Aideal Hiroba,” a disability and minority-focused web platform that reached one million page views in its first year of operation. Yu Taguchi is the mother of a child with a disability. “My Son’s Favorite God Is the One His Parents Threw Away,” her first publication in English, is also published in Japanese—with thanks to the author—in this issue of Wordgathering.
About Diane R. Wiener
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, For The Birds Arts & Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, eMerge, and Beyond Words. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.