Akane Torikai, notable for producing reality-grounded feminist manga including Sensei's Pious Lie, presents her first speculative fiction: Wandering Cat's Cage, which poses an ominous dystopian future for human reproduction. The prolific Jocelyne Allen provides a gratifying English-language translation of the graphic novel, which was originally published in Japan in 2018.
Despite the order and privilege available in Town, inhabitants still flee across the water to where petty crime and controlled chaos prevail. Sanada, who escaped traffickers and was raised and trained by an acupuncturist in the Slum, is now a "queen" practitioner. She lives with Reiho who, as "a grown young man," is an extreme rarity amid a society in which women are the majority and the shrinking birthrate is decimating humanity. Sanada and Reiho's found family unexpectedly grows with the addition of lost, runaway thieves--Ejima from Town; her "strays," Kiri and Kanan; and finally Jun, who just wants "to know about men." Reiho belongs in "a facility," but so far, he's managed to live freely (enough), earning money from Town's wealthy night visitors. When he's kidnapped for his breeding potential, Sanada initiates a daring, dangerous rescue.
Torikai creates expressive black-and-white panels in markedly thin lines, proving particularly adept at depicting expressions, attitudes, and hair. Sanada's coveted tresses and Reiho's androgynous bob are caught in impressively minimal strokes that never seem to still. The delicacy of Torikai's art underscores the fragility of bodily autonomy as once-common human functions--sex, pregnancy, parenthood--are strictly regulated under suffocating threat. With chilling intimacy, Torikai offers a disturbing new world already too convincingly familiar. --Terry Hong