Akane Torikai’s second manga to reach the U.S. market imagines a near-future Japan where men are nearly obsolete. With procreation handled in the lab and women in charge, daily life is free of turmoil but tightly controlled by the state. Wealthy, conforming citizens live in The Town, while the balance of humanity tough it out across the river in Not Town, where freedom is greater but conditions are decidedly ramshackle and dangerous.
Buy Wandering Cat’s CageThe story carries shades of A Handmaid’s Tale, with women subjugating themselves and their wombs to the directives of their shadowy rulers, but is even more comparable to Y: The Last Man, where women have been without men for so long that the mere appearance of one is a massive and potentially dangerous curiosity. As opposed to Y’s focus on the recent aftermath of male extinction, here the male gender has been absent for so long that the current generation broadly has no idea what makes men physically different. This raises a lucrative revenue stream for an effete young man occasionally spotted in Not Town, with women clamoring for a peek at the hidden contents of his robe.
Torikai’s writing style is somewhat vague and indirect, with the players and situations gleaned more from inference than explicit description. While that’s a general shortcoming of the manga genre as a whole, here the hazy framework she constructs is intriguing enough that it warrants careful inspection, with pieces coming into clearer focus on subsequent readings. There’s still much left unsaid, such as any backstory on how society and her characters got to this point and clarification on mysterious tidbits she sprinkles throughout, but readers willing to put in some work will be rewarded with a fascinating scenario.
Her artwork utilizes delicate, wispy lines and subtle shading that add to the dreamy quality of the black-and-white work, even as the story covers some heavy topics. Characters are rendered fairly lifelike with clearly Asian features and understated expressions, firmly establishing the realism of the players, even as they navigate a setting of her imagination. The Town isn’t Tokyo, with Torikai instead rendering her fictional mid-size Town and rickety shantytown outskirts with no clear parallels to actual locations. Backgrounds are richly detailed, establishing a captivating world awaiting in-depth exploration.
The hardcover book includes a preface by Torikai where she extols the works of one of her primary manga inspirations, Moto Hagio, a continuing trailblazer in speculative science fiction who Torikai emulates in this work. As with Hagio, the fantasy setting affords Torikai greater flexibility to address feminist and political issues, most pointedly the ongoing real-world threats to reproductive rights. Her personal views and thoughts on the manga industry are covered in greater depth in a wide-ranging interview that concludes the book, an inspiring read that adds to understanding of the story.
