A Drunken Dream; Moto Hagio

A Drunken Dream And Other Stories is an excellent ten story short story collection by manga cartoonist Moto Hagio, published by Fantagraphics. Fantagraphics doesn't usually publish manga in any form, so for them to publish A Drunken Dream, lets potential readers know that this material is amongst the cream of that artform. Moto Hagio has been creating / producing manga since 1969 and is at the forefront of women cartoonists in Japan, having won many prestigious awards. A Drunken Dream collects ten short stories by Hagio, but she's done many epic length series / graphic novels that sadly haven't been translated here in the U.S. (her most famous manga series here in America is They Were Eleven!).
As beautiful, haunting, dark, and sad as the stories in A Drunken Dream are, this gorgeous graphic novel also has a text overview of some other prominent Japanese women cartoonists (and you'll wish the books talked about were available here) and an excellent interview by Matt Thorn of Moto Hagio (reprinted from a 2005 issue of The Comics Journal). Even though Moto Hagio won many awards, her parents never came to terms with her doing manga and this interview has many insightful comments by Hagio regarding this.

Following is a postscript e-mail from Hagio after the above mentioned interview was completed that really speaks volumes about a few different topics:

"During the course of yesterday's interview, I came to a fresh realization. My father and mother, in an attempt to create the ideal family, disciplined us in various ways. Accepting us as we were was out of the question. In their minds, the proper way was to force children into the form the parents desired. In fact, I accepted my parents' way of discipling us and forcing us into a mold as reality. But now I wonder if that discipline itself was not un-reality, was not a fiction. I can't explain myself well, but I wonder if my parents, too, did not mistake the fiction of 'creating the ideal family' for reality? Would you call such a situation a 'self-contained domestic illusion?' And I, in order too escape from this 'self-contained domestic illusion,' fled to the worlds pf science fiction and fantasy. Hmm..."