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My Journey to Her
Yūna Hirasawa
Manga

NOTE: If you're squeamish about body/medical things, be cautious when reading this manga.

I was hoping there would be more exploration of gender, how the author arrived at her realization that she was trans, how she dealt with the initial internal an external hurdles of coming out and taking action, that kind of preliminary and foundational stuff. Instead, the story is almost exclusively about her bottom surgery and legal transition, with only tiny glimpses of the stuff I was hoping for peppered throughout. For what it did focus on, it was surprisingly detailed in ways that were a bit intense to read sometimes. There's some really messed up legal stuff around gender in Japan, at least in ~2016 when it was written. The author doesn't really make any value judgements on most of it (an intentional decision by the author).

While the story is her story, it leans more towards being an objective record of events than a full-on diary/manifesto/memoir, and I do wish it leaned more towards the latter. All the same, it's very cute and charming, nicely-paced, gently funny, and has its emotional moments. It even has some pretty helpful full-text pages between chapters that could serve as a useful reference for various medical/legal topics on the subject matter.

I'm glad this manga exists and glad she was able to tell her story.