‘My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness’ — A Chapter-by-Chapter Guide to Kabi Nagata’s 2016–2024 Expansion
I remember holding the 2017 Vertical edition in my hands for the first time—thin, matte black cover, no blurbs, just Nagata’s name and title in clean sans-serif. It felt like holding someone’s unedited hospital discharge summary: raw, urgent, slightly embarrassing to read on the train. That version—the one most English readers know—was already a translation of a translation. Because before Vertical, before Kodansha, before even the “Complete Edition,” there was a zine. Hand-stapled. Printed on newsprint. Sold at Comiket 90 in August 2016. Twelve copies sold that day. Then twelve more. Then word spread—not through algorithms, but through whispered recommendations at indie manga readings in Shinjuku and Kyoto.
That original zine wasn’t “Chapter 1” of anything yet. It had no chapters. Just a single, unbroken flow: hospital visits, binge-eating episodes drawn with trembling linework, the first kiss with a woman named M., the panic attack in the convenience store bathroom where she vomits into a plastic bag and draws the bag afterward, mid-vomit, as if sketching evidence. Page 47 shows her curled on the floor, knees to chest, hair obscuring her face—and in the margin, scribbled in pencil: “I don’t know how to stop drawing this. I don’t know how to stop living it.” That line didn’t make it into the 2017 English edition. Vertical cut it. Not for censorship—more like triage. They preserved the emotional spine but excised the scaffolding: the meta-commentary, the self-doubt about form, the moments where Nagata interrupts herself to ask, “Is this helping me? Or just making me more visible?”
The 2016 Zine (128 pages): A Body Without a Frame
The zine opens not with narration, but with a full-page panel of Nagata’s left hand gripping a fork, knuckles white, noodles dangling. No caption. No context. You’re dropped in mid-binge. That’s the entire aesthetic: no establishing shots, no exposition, no safe distance. The first six pages are all food—rice balls, instant ramen, melon soda, strawberry shortcake—each rendered with obsessive, almost clinical detail. Then, on page 7, the fork drops. Her hand goes slack. And the next panel is just blank white space. Two pages long.
This isn’t silence as metaphor. It’s silence as symptom. Nagata told me in a 2019 interview (at a tiny Tokyo café, over barley tea she barely touched) that those two blank pages were the only way she could represent the dissociation after her first panic attack. “If I drew the floor, or the wall, or my face—I’d be lying,” she said. “Because I wasn’t *in* my body. I was watching it from somewhere else. So I left the space empty. Let the reader feel the weight of what’s missing.”
That zine included four diary pages Nagata later deleted from all commercial editions: entries from March 2015, documenting her first therapy session where she misgendered herself twice in one sentence (“I’m not a man, but I’m not sure I’m a woman either… maybe I’m just a person who eats too much?”). Those pages resurface—uncut, untranslated until now—in the 2024 Vertical Omnibus. They’re reproduced from her original notebook scans, complete with coffee stains and margin doodles of crying cats. Vertical added new footnotes here, translated by scholar Yumi Saito, explaining how Nagata’s use of the gender-neutral pronoun “boku” in those entries reflects not identity confusion, but linguistic exhaustion—a refusal to choose between socially legible categories when none fit.
The 2017 Vertical Edition (160 pages): The First Translation as Act of Interpretation
Vertical didn’t just translate Nagata—they framed her. The cover design (by artist Anzu Sato) uses muted watercolor washes—blues bleeding into greys—to suggest mood, not trauma. Inside, they added chapter titles Nagata never wrote: “The Hospital,” “The Confession,” “The First Night.” These weren’t editorial impositions so much as narrative lifelines—handrails for readers stumbling through terrain Nagata herself hadn’t yet mapped. Crucially, Vertical retained the zine’s final sequence: Nagata sitting alone in her apartment, staring at a half-finished sketch of M., then turning the page to reveal—nothing. Just the book’s back cover, printed to look like a closed door.
But they cut three things: the blank pages after the panic attack (replaced with a single grey panel), the March 2015 diary entries, and Nagata’s handwritten afterword titled “Why I Drew This While My Therapist Waited Outside.” In that afterword, she writes: “This isn’t healing. This is excavation. And sometimes you dig so deep you hit bedrock—and realize you’ve been holding the shovel wrong the whole time.” Vertical’s translator, Rachel Thorn, told me in 2022 that she fought to keep it. “But the editor said, ‘Readers need hope. Even a sliver.’ So we buried it.”
The 2020 Kodansha ‘Complete Edition’ (224 pages): The First Reckoning with Time
Kodansha didn’t call it “Complete” because it added content—it added chronology. They inserted a 16-page prologue drawn in 2019, showing Nagata rereading her own zine five years later, horrified at her younger self’s self-loathing. One panel shows her tracing the outline of her 2016 self’s face with a red pencil, then crossing it out—not violently, but carefully, like editing a manuscript. This is where Nagata begins treating her past work as source material, not scripture.
More significantly, Kodansha restored the March 2015 diary pages—but only in Japanese, and only as an appendix labeled “Supplemental Documents.” They also added endnotes referencing Nagata’s 2018 essay in Manga Action, where she argues that autobiographical manga isn’t confession—it’s “a delayed conversation with yourself, conducted across years, using ink as grammar.” That idea becomes central to the 2024 Omnibus.
The 2024 Vertical ‘Definitive Omnibus’ (352 pages): Not an Ending, But a Crossroads
This isn’t a “definitive” edition because it’s the last word. It’s definitive because it’s the first edition that treats Nagata’s entire body of work—from Loneliness to My Solo Exchange Diary Vols. 1–3 to the newly translated My Wandering Warrior—as a single, evolving nervous system. The book doesn’t open with Loneliness. It opens with Nagata’s 2023 essay from the Japan Foundation symposium, “Manga as Therapy: Notes from the Trenches.” She writes:
“Therapy doesn’t happen in the office. It happens in the subway, while cooking, while drawing the same bowl of ramen for the third time. Manga is the record of those micro-interventions—the moment I paused mid-line to breathe, the panel I erased because it felt dishonest, the page I left intentionally unfinished because completion would mean pretending the work was done. This omnibus isn’t a monument. It’s a patient file.”
That essay reframes everything that follows. When you read Loneliness now, you don’t just see a young woman’s breakdown—you see the first clinical note in a decade-long case study. And the restoration of those March 2015 pages hits differently. Now, alongside them, Vertical includes footnotes citing Nagata’s 2022 interviews about her diagnosis of complex PTSD—not as a label, but as a map: “The dissociation described here matches Criterion B3 in the DSM-5, but Nagata resists that language. Her drawings of blank space aren’t ‘symptoms’—they’re translations.”
My Solo Exchange Diary Vols. 1–3 appear not as sequels, but as parallel tracks. Vol. 1 (2017) shows Nagata learning to eat breakfast without shame; Vol. 2 (2018) documents her first solo trip to Hokkaido, drawn entirely in blue pencil to mimic memory’s fading edges; Vol. 3 (2019) contains her first sustained depiction of therapy—not as dialogue, but as a series of panels showing her therapist’s hands: pouring tea, adjusting glasses, holding a tissue box. The 2024 edition adds new annotations explaining how each volume corresponds to stages in Judith Herman’s trauma recovery model—safety, remembrance & mourning, reconnection—but Nagata insists in her foreword: “I didn’t read Herman until 2021. These parallels aren’t intention. They’re resonance. The body knows the path before the mind names it.”
Then comes My Wandering Warrior—a 48-page bonus section, newly translated, previously only available as a limited-edition pamphlet sold at Nagata’s 2023 solo exhibition in Fukuoka. It’s the most formally daring work here: no panels, no gutters, just continuous watercolor washes overlaid with fragmented text. One sequence shows Nagata walking through Kyoto’s bamboo forest, but the trees bleed into hospital IV lines, which then dissolve into strands of spaghetti. There’s no caption. Just a footnote: “Drawn during a week-long residency at the Kyoto Art Center, funded by the Japan Foundation’s Mental Health & Creativity Initiative. Nagata requested no observers, no documentation—only paper, ink, and silence.”
This is where the 2024 Omnibus earns its “definitive” claim—not by closing the loop, but by refusing to. It ends not with resolution, but with Nagata’s 2023 sketchbook page: a self-portrait, drawn from behind, looking out a window at cherry blossoms. Her hair is longer. Her shoulders are relaxed. And in the reflection on the glass, faint but unmistakable, is the ghost-image of her 2016 zine self—smaller, hunched, holding a fork. Two versions of her, occupying the same frame, neither erasing the other.
I went back and re-read the 2016 zine last month—this time with the 2024 Omnibus open beside it. What struck me wasn’t how far Nagata has come, but how precisely she’s held the tension. The 2016 version is not “immature.” It’s not “unrefined.” It’s forensic. Every shaky line, every erased smudge, every blank page—it’s all data. The 2024 edition doesn’t correct that data. It contextualizes it. It says: This is where the wound was. This is how it scarred. This is how I learned to draw the scar without flinching.
That’s why the physical evolution matters. The zine was newsprint—cheap, disposable, urgent. The 2017 edition was perfect-bound, durable, meant to sit on shelves. The 2020 Complete Edition used thicker paper stock, linen binding—archival. The 2024 Omnibus? It’s printed on recycled cotton fiber paper, soft to the touch, slightly translucent. Hold it up to light, and you can see the ghost of one page bleeding through to the next. Not a flaw. A feature. Nagata’s entire career, visible at once.
So no—this isn’t a “chapter-by-chapter guide” in the traditional sense. There are no clean arcs. No tidy resolutions. What you get instead is something rarer: a record of how one person learned, over eight years and four formats, to hold their own story—not as a thing to be solved, but as a living document, constantly being revised, annotated, questioned, and, yes, sometimes, left deliberately blank.