Garo was once Japan's most famous alternative comics magazine, willing to publish stories others would never touch. Even so, few Garo artists were quite like Murasaki Yamada, whose elegantly drawn tales of family life are collected in Talk to My Back. Yamada's comics capture the joy and frustration of parenting, the ways in which men take women for granted, and the liberation offered by financial independence from the family unit. Japan has a long history of comics artists drawing stories about girls and women, but few in Yamada's time were as willing to demand more on the page.