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Devenir enfin moi-même
»Werde ich es schaffen, mich selbst lieben zu lernen?«
Autorin Yuna Hirasawa unternimmt eine Reise nach Thailand, um sich dort ihren Wunsch zu erfüllen! Denn in Thailand lässt sie ihren Körper dem einer Frau anpassen, damit ihr äußeres Ich endlich ihrem inneren entspricht. Mit dem Einzelband »Yunas Reise zum Ich« will sie ihren Trans-Lesern Ängste nehmen und bei ihren Cis-Lesern Verständnis wecken.
Begleite Yuna auf ihrer Reise zu ihrem wahren Ich!
Autorin Yuna Hirasawa unternimmt eine Reise nach Thailand, um sich dort ihren Wunsch zu erfüllen! Denn in Thailand lässt sie ihren Körper dem einer Frau anpassen, damit ihr äußeres Ich endlich ihrem inneren entspricht. Mit dem Einzelband »Yunas Reise zum Ich« will sie ihren Trans-Lesern Ängste nehmen und bei ihren Cis-Lesern Verständnis wecken.
Begleite Yuna auf ihrer Reise zu ihrem wahren Ich!
144 pages, Paperback
First published June 23, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 148 reviews
October 7, 2025
A Japanese woman shares her experiences traveling alone to Thailand in 2015 for her gender affirmation surgery.
It's very informative, but it is also quite harrowing at times as she deals with a language gap, her personal anxieties, isolation, phantom pain, torturous therapy, and a post-operative complication. Thank goodness for the army of Thai nurses who smooth the bumps with their cheerful positivity.
Disclosure: I received access to a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.com.
FOR REFERENCE:
Contents: Episode 1 -- Info Note #1. The State of Transportation in Thailand -- The Fashion of Thai Nurses -- Episode 2 -- Info Note #2. Some Terminologies Used by People Living with Gender Dysphoria -- After I Started HRT . . . -- Episode 3 -- Info Note #3. The Difference Between Penile Inversion Vaginoplasty and Sigmoid Colon Vaginoplasty -- The Mysterious "Good!!" -- Episode 4 -- Info Note #4. The Pain of Dilation -- Dilation Lecture -- Episode 5 -- Info Note #5. Hospital Meals -- A Unique Pronunciation -- Episode 6 -- Info Note #6. Changing the Gender on the Family Register for People with Gender Dysphoria -- The Nurse Who Loves Japan -- Episode 7 -- Episode 8 -- Afterword -- [Acknowledgments] -- Translation Notes -- References
It's very informative, but it is also quite harrowing at times as she deals with a language gap, her personal anxieties, isolation, phantom pain, torturous therapy, and a post-operative complication. Thank goodness for the army of Thai nurses who smooth the bumps with their cheerful positivity.
Disclosure: I received access to a copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.com.
FOR REFERENCE:
Contents: Episode 1 -- Info Note #1. The State of Transportation in Thailand -- The Fashion of Thai Nurses -- Episode 2 -- Info Note #2. Some Terminologies Used by People Living with Gender Dysphoria -- After I Started HRT . . . -- Episode 3 -- Info Note #3. The Difference Between Penile Inversion Vaginoplasty and Sigmoid Colon Vaginoplasty -- The Mysterious "Good!!" -- Episode 4 -- Info Note #4. The Pain of Dilation -- Dilation Lecture -- Episode 5 -- Info Note #5. Hospital Meals -- A Unique Pronunciation -- Episode 6 -- Info Note #6. Changing the Gender on the Family Register for People with Gender Dysphoria -- The Nurse Who Loves Japan -- Episode 7 -- Episode 8 -- Afterword -- [Acknowledgments] -- Translation Notes -- References
August 9, 2024
Yuna Hirasawa was not always Yuna Hirasawa. And her path to where she is now was not especially easy. In fact, it was downright difficult, almost torturous. A story of the struggles of being trans, but not the struggles we typically see focused on.
This was educational. It is not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination, showing the exact steps required for Hirasawa to fully transition to their gender, but it shines a real light on gender dysmorphia and how hard it can be to overcome it.
The trials and tribulations here are a little different than most - this is less about the prejudices of people, though that certainly gets a bit of a light shone on it, and far more about the massive undertaking that gender reassignment surgery is.
So, when I say this was eye-opening, I cannot forget to mention that it was also stomach turning at points with the description of what the surgery entails. It’s presented with some appreciated levity, but genital alteration isn’t going to go down smooth no matter how you frame it.
And that’s only the start of a story that also touches on urinary tract issues and phantom limb pain (yes, that one). If you’re especially squeamish this tries to use a metaphor but it doesn’t really make it any less eye-watering at times.
As a consequence, however, the medical aspects are incredibly thorough and really filled in some blanks I didn’t even realize I wasn’t thinking of (the creation and maintenance of a new vagina is… a thing…).
Yet that is only part of the equation itself. The surgical details and the reflections on Thai culture and medicine are detailed as all get out, but the real story is also how much happier Hirasawa clearly feels once the whole thing is over.
Between that and the substantial support from most of her family, this is both sides of Hirasawa’s journey and that keeps it from being entirely too clinical or overly dramatic. This is a thing that happened and here’s how. If the nurses learned Japanese from One Piece? That’s just how it goes.
It’s a good presentation of an important topic that helps with one of the most difficult things when you’re looking at a topic from the outside in: understanding. I support trans rights all the way, but this gave me a better perspective and I liked that.
There’s even a very funny series of 4-koma amidst the regular chapters that puts the last actual 4-koma manga I read to shame (although if you know what one that is, it wasn’t that difficult). Genuinely funny.
4 stars - and genuinely interesting to boot. A hopeful story that might not be for those of a weaker constitution, yet offers a lot of perspective that explains things in a very engaging manner.
This was educational. It is not an easy read by any stretch of the imagination, showing the exact steps required for Hirasawa to fully transition to their gender, but it shines a real light on gender dysmorphia and how hard it can be to overcome it.
The trials and tribulations here are a little different than most - this is less about the prejudices of people, though that certainly gets a bit of a light shone on it, and far more about the massive undertaking that gender reassignment surgery is.
So, when I say this was eye-opening, I cannot forget to mention that it was also stomach turning at points with the description of what the surgery entails. It’s presented with some appreciated levity, but genital alteration isn’t going to go down smooth no matter how you frame it.
And that’s only the start of a story that also touches on urinary tract issues and phantom limb pain (yes, that one). If you’re especially squeamish this tries to use a metaphor but it doesn’t really make it any less eye-watering at times.
As a consequence, however, the medical aspects are incredibly thorough and really filled in some blanks I didn’t even realize I wasn’t thinking of (the creation and maintenance of a new vagina is… a thing…).
Yet that is only part of the equation itself. The surgical details and the reflections on Thai culture and medicine are detailed as all get out, but the real story is also how much happier Hirasawa clearly feels once the whole thing is over.
Between that and the substantial support from most of her family, this is both sides of Hirasawa’s journey and that keeps it from being entirely too clinical or overly dramatic. This is a thing that happened and here’s how. If the nurses learned Japanese from One Piece? That’s just how it goes.
It’s a good presentation of an important topic that helps with one of the most difficult things when you’re looking at a topic from the outside in: understanding. I support trans rights all the way, but this gave me a better perspective and I liked that.
There’s even a very funny series of 4-koma amidst the regular chapters that puts the last actual 4-koma manga I read to shame (although if you know what one that is, it wasn’t that difficult). Genuinely funny.
4 stars - and genuinely interesting to boot. A hopeful story that might not be for those of a weaker constitution, yet offers a lot of perspective that explains things in a very engaging manner.
September 3, 2025
My Journey to Her by Yūna Hirasawa is a memoir that tackles an incredibly important and personal subject: her transition as a trans woman in Japan. It’s an honest and detailed look at her journey, from her initial diagnosis of gender dysphoria to the medical and legal processes she underwent, including her trip to Thailand for gender-affirming surgery.
I appreciate Yūna’s happy-go-lucky and positive perspective throughout the story. It prevents the narrative from becoming the dark and gloomy read it easily could have been, given the sensitive subject matter. While the jokes sometimes didn't land for me, this optimistic tone made the book a much more enjoyable experience.
However, I found it hard to connect with the story on a personal level. The specific details of the transition, the reasons behind it, and the experience of gender dysphoria are all vital to the narrative, but they weren't experiences I could relate to. Because of this, I wasn't able to connect with the story as much as I had hoped sadly.
Despite this, the book is well-written and valuable. While my personal connection was limited, I believe many people will find themselves deeply relating to her journey. It’s a brave and open account of a very personal process. It's definitely worth a read, and I think a lot of people will enjoy it even more than I did.
I'd give it a 3 out of 5.
I appreciate Yūna’s happy-go-lucky and positive perspective throughout the story. It prevents the narrative from becoming the dark and gloomy read it easily could have been, given the sensitive subject matter. While the jokes sometimes didn't land for me, this optimistic tone made the book a much more enjoyable experience.
However, I found it hard to connect with the story on a personal level. The specific details of the transition, the reasons behind it, and the experience of gender dysphoria are all vital to the narrative, but they weren't experiences I could relate to. Because of this, I wasn't able to connect with the story as much as I had hoped sadly.
Despite this, the book is well-written and valuable. While my personal connection was limited, I believe many people will find themselves deeply relating to her journey. It’s a brave and open account of a very personal process. It's definitely worth a read, and I think a lot of people will enjoy it even more than I did.
I'd give it a 3 out of 5.
April 16, 2024
Très instructif et expliqué de façon simple mais précise, avec les angoisses liées à l'opération mais aussi de l'humour. Des explications accompagnent le texte sur la société japonaises et sur la Thaïlande, lieu où s'est déroulée son opération.
April 16, 2024
Un excellent manga sur la transidentité et la disphorie de genre. J'aurai plaisir à conseiller ce one shot <3 POUR UNE FOIS QUE CEST BIEN ECRIT ET RENSEIGNÉ ? c'est un grand oui ♡
July 8, 2025
This was a very comprehensive account of a very personal story of the mangaka's transition. This could so easily have been dark and dry. However, it was a very specific journey, told with great humor and openness. I needed to take long breaks from the story as it got more and more gnarly and personally triggered about how gender-affirming care can be so prohibitively expensive and may require someone to go through this painful journey alone. All of that said, I wish there was a bit more of an ending that explored BEING a woman.
July 31, 2025
A very personal and accurate look at gender affirmation surgery in Thailand.
August 21, 2026
Thank you NetGalley for the eARC of My Journey to Her!
This was such an informational read about what it means to transition in another county, presented in a thoughtful and captivating way. I appreciated the unflinching acknowledgement of the pain that goes with the surgery, how even with surgery there are still other aspects to the dysphoria and anxiety, the loneliness that can come from living a life that isn't as authentic as it could be and as others get to live without a thought about that privilege. Yuna's storytelling style doesn't shy away from hard things, but somehow still remains cozy and hopeful. A delight to read.
This was such an informational read about what it means to transition in another county, presented in a thoughtful and captivating way. I appreciated the unflinching acknowledgement of the pain that goes with the surgery, how even with surgery there are still other aspects to the dysphoria and anxiety, the loneliness that can come from living a life that isn't as authentic as it could be and as others get to live without a thought about that privilege. Yuna's storytelling style doesn't shy away from hard things, but somehow still remains cozy and hopeful. A delight to read.
October 11, 2026
Very informative memoir of the author's journey to get her documents changed officially to woman in Japan. I had no idea, for it to be approved, you needed to prove, with several inspections, that your genitalia matches the gender you wanted to appear on your family registry and all your documents. The author takes us to Thailand where she gets gender affirming surgery and shows us everything that's happening and I was really surprised at everything that was done and was needed, at everything she went through. I was happy seeing she was supported and that luckily she did not encountered many obstacles of her journey. It was a very teachable moment.
August 15, 2026
My Journey to her follows author Yuna Hirasawa experience visiting Thailand to receive gender-affirming surgery. Told in at times conversational, at times humorous, and at times emotional writing, I appreciated how candid and honest the author was throughout.
The auto-biographical details of this make it incredibly personal for the mangaka and her journey, while still having plenty of space devoted to expanding the audience's knowledge and understanding. Her lived experiences and feelings come through so clearly and shine. I really enjoyed details like the nurse who only knew Japanese through anime, and sweet moments like her thank-you card to her care team when she was discharged.
While I didn't enjoy Luca the Dragon Vet from the same author, this manga felt far more fleshed out, emotional, and well-researched. I would definitely pick up more from this author, especially if they were in the non-fiction genre. I think this an important read for de-stigmatizing and de-mythologizing trans healthcare, and essential reading.
Thank you to Kodansha Comics for my ARC provided through Netgalley.
The auto-biographical details of this make it incredibly personal for the mangaka and her journey, while still having plenty of space devoted to expanding the audience's knowledge and understanding. Her lived experiences and feelings come through so clearly and shine. I really enjoyed details like the nurse who only knew Japanese through anime, and sweet moments like her thank-you card to her care team when she was discharged.
While I didn't enjoy Luca the Dragon Vet from the same author, this manga felt far more fleshed out, emotional, and well-researched. I would definitely pick up more from this author, especially if they were in the non-fiction genre. I think this an important read for de-stigmatizing and de-mythologizing trans healthcare, and essential reading.
Thank you to Kodansha Comics for my ARC provided through Netgalley.
September 18, 2025
This was genuinely so informative! I was expecting an emotional and personal journey (and I did get that), but I also ended up getting real information out of this.
The author is very brave and I think the depiction of her hardships and the details of the operation/what followed will definitely help others in a similar situation (although the legal side of things is very specific to Japan).
There was also multiple funny and lighthearted moments!
Thank you to NetGalley and the author for the eARC!
The author is very brave and I think the depiction of her hardships and the details of the operation/what followed will definitely help others in a similar situation (although the legal side of things is very specific to Japan).
There was also multiple funny and lighthearted moments!
Thank you to NetGalley and the author for the eARC!
June 8, 2025
"My Journey to Her" details Yuna Hirasawa's medical and legal journey to being recognized as a woman. I would say this manga falls into the informative graphic novel/manga genre, as it is about 80% information and 20% personal, even though this is a retelling of her surgery/recovery/etc. This does not mean it is devoid of Hirasawa's personality, or lacks a humanizing factor as she explains her anxiousness and pain through some pretty severe medical ordeals. The Thai medical staff also get to showcase their personalities through brief interactions. But the tone of the manga prioritizes how Hirasawa navigated such things, and less about the journey to self-actualization that other memoirs have demonstrated. There is even a very humorous digression using a hotdog and tofu block to visualize the surgical procedure, joined with her friend's increasingly comedic discomfort about seeing it.
I will admit this manga does not shy away from the complications presented in bottom surgery. While none of the illustrations showed a graphic depiction of surgery or any genitals, the descriptions could be enough to make me cross my legs. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is squeamish about medical procedures.
Overall, "My Journey to Her" is a well-told, humanizing discussion of one person's journey to being seen as a woman. The writing is very clear to point out that the situation Hirasawa went through could be radically different depending on country and contemporary events.
I will admit this manga does not shy away from the complications presented in bottom surgery. While none of the illustrations showed a graphic depiction of surgery or any genitals, the descriptions could be enough to make me cross my legs. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is squeamish about medical procedures.
Overall, "My Journey to Her" is a well-told, humanizing discussion of one person's journey to being seen as a woman. The writing is very clear to point out that the situation Hirasawa went through could be radically different depending on country and contemporary events.
December 11, 2023
Nice lil manga that depicts the draconian measures the Japanese state deploys against trans folks.
To get a name and gender change, a trans person must undergo sex reassignment surgery and identity with the opposite gender to their assigned gender. Here, the state is both bioessentialist and culturally conservative, requiring full assimilation into cis identity for transitioning to occur. Furthermore, hormone therapy is only administered to persons who are diagnosed as gender dysphoric. In other words, transness only gains legitimation as a deviancy in need of fixing. Lastly, it takes two psychiatric evaluations to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and subsequently accepted as one's desired gender.
Hirasawa compares the Japanese system to that of Thailand, which centres on trans experience and desires, rather than the expertise of a disinterested professional class. Such a compassionate and efficient system makes Hirasawa reflect on not only Japan's systemic transphobia, but also the rigid categories of man and woman that structure life in Japan. Gender itself becomes a more fluid construct, trapped by systems of control, whether legal, medical, or cultural. Hirasawa doesn't really elaborate on this point, but you can find more in-depth interrogations of gender in Double House, Bokura no Hentai, and Our Dreams at Dusk.
To get a name and gender change, a trans person must undergo sex reassignment surgery and identity with the opposite gender to their assigned gender. Here, the state is both bioessentialist and culturally conservative, requiring full assimilation into cis identity for transitioning to occur. Furthermore, hormone therapy is only administered to persons who are diagnosed as gender dysphoric. In other words, transness only gains legitimation as a deviancy in need of fixing. Lastly, it takes two psychiatric evaluations to be diagnosed with gender dysphoria and subsequently accepted as one's desired gender.
Hirasawa compares the Japanese system to that of Thailand, which centres on trans experience and desires, rather than the expertise of a disinterested professional class. Such a compassionate and efficient system makes Hirasawa reflect on not only Japan's systemic transphobia, but also the rigid categories of man and woman that structure life in Japan. Gender itself becomes a more fluid construct, trapped by systems of control, whether legal, medical, or cultural. Hirasawa doesn't really elaborate on this point, but you can find more in-depth interrogations of gender in Double House, Bokura no Hentai, and Our Dreams at Dusk.
June 11, 2025
I received this book from the publisher/Netgalley in exchange of an honest review.
Wow, what a powerful book. We follow Yuuna Hirasawa as she goes through gender affirming surgery, see her before that with her visits to the doctors to the get the Gender Dysphoria diagnosis so she could start treatments and get that surgery, we see the after-effects of the surgery (not just the pain but also the aftercare, the relief when she could pee and fart, and sorry I laughed at how all the nurses were complimenting her new vagina), and what she has to do when she gets home. It was a wonderful book and I loved every bit of it. It was very informative with her explaining several things and even single pages with extra information (and not just on being trans but also Thailand or the hospital food). I knew several things (this is not my first book about the topic) but I also learned new things. I loved how supportive her sister-in-law, her brother, and sister were and how they constantly send messages to her while she was in Thailand.
I wish Yuuna Hirasawa the best life full of happiness. I would highly recommend this book.
Wow, what a powerful book. We follow Yuuna Hirasawa as she goes through gender affirming surgery, see her before that with her visits to the doctors to the get the Gender Dysphoria diagnosis so she could start treatments and get that surgery, we see the after-effects of the surgery (not just the pain but also the aftercare, the relief when she could pee and fart, and sorry I laughed at how all the nurses were complimenting her new vagina), and what she has to do when she gets home. It was a wonderful book and I loved every bit of it. It was very informative with her explaining several things and even single pages with extra information (and not just on being trans but also Thailand or the hospital food). I knew several things (this is not my first book about the topic) but I also learned new things. I loved how supportive her sister-in-law, her brother, and sister were and how they constantly send messages to her while she was in Thailand.
I wish Yuuna Hirasawa the best life full of happiness. I would highly recommend this book.
August 11, 2026
4.25⭐️
Thank you to NetGalley and Kodansha Comics for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
My Journey to Her follows Yuna as she struggles through the hurdles to finally recieve gender affirming surgery. She chooses to travel to Thailand, as they are renowned for their service and care. We primarily focus on the time in Thailand with flashes to her life back home in Japan.
As someone who believed they were fairly aware of the process of this form of care, I was able to learn more things I did not know. It was both informative and also filled with heart and humor. My only wish is that I got to learn a little more background on Yuna, or even her present timeline, as this is set in 2015. However, it was a great story all the same, and I am grateful it was able to be published and shared!
Thank you to NetGalley and Kodansha Comics for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.
My Journey to Her follows Yuna as she struggles through the hurdles to finally recieve gender affirming surgery. She chooses to travel to Thailand, as they are renowned for their service and care. We primarily focus on the time in Thailand with flashes to her life back home in Japan.
As someone who believed they were fairly aware of the process of this form of care, I was able to learn more things I did not know. It was both informative and also filled with heart and humor. My only wish is that I got to learn a little more background on Yuna, or even her present timeline, as this is set in 2015. However, it was a great story all the same, and I am grateful it was able to be published and shared!
November 7, 2025
Thank you Kodansha Comics Publisher and Netgalley for the advanced readers copy!
I am personally not into mangas. I have read a couple but rarely finished them. I tend to be mesmerized by the drawings and find myself too lazy to even read the long dialogues, unlike when I read novels. Surprisingly, even with the deeper and present issue the author experienced, I finished the book within two days.
I was genuinely impressed by Yuna's work. I can not imagine myself writing about an awful experience I had, trying to dig deeper in my memories and reliving it again and again. Much more trying to visualize how I was then using drawings. I applaud her bravery.
The manga was something I never read before. As I mentioned, manga is not generally something I would go to a bookstore and pick up. A memoir manga is definitely out of my comfort zone. Fortunately, this book was actually impressive, given with only 150 pages, Yuna effectively captured her experience and let us readers see a glimpse of what she had gone through.
Yes, some say that manga is simply a Japanese comic book. However, My Journey To Her is definitely something else. She added quirky bits or drawings here and there, yet I felt that I was there with her, trying to hold her hand while suffering through post operation struggles and pains. I found myself stopping midway, closing my eyes, and telepathically telling her that if I only had my ways to be there with her by her bed, I would have.
I learned a lot from the story, not just her own experience but rather how she explained her dysmorphia and even the surgery itself like I was 5. It was simple, yet knowledgeable. I did appreciate her mentioning once or twice to do our own research, acknowledging that she may have a first hand experience but still, her own does not speak to everyone else. The subtle humility from the protagonist herself is very uplifting.
I even found myself in a rabbit hole at 11 PM trying to learn more about gender dysmorphia. I have been living in this world for a few decades now, and I felt ashamed not knowing about it, realizing that a lot of people suffer while I live obliviously. It opened my eyes in a world I never knew existed because of this manga.
I do hope that Yuna writes more about herself, but I know this is quite a stretch. Seeing a glimpse of her life, I got curious about where she is now, how difficult it must have been to follow through medical things even after the procedure. Though I know that it is her choice if she opens another door and let us peek once more into her life. I genuinely hope she is in a better place compared to when she was suffering pre operation.
I am personally not into mangas. I have read a couple but rarely finished them. I tend to be mesmerized by the drawings and find myself too lazy to even read the long dialogues, unlike when I read novels. Surprisingly, even with the deeper and present issue the author experienced, I finished the book within two days.
I was genuinely impressed by Yuna's work. I can not imagine myself writing about an awful experience I had, trying to dig deeper in my memories and reliving it again and again. Much more trying to visualize how I was then using drawings. I applaud her bravery.
The manga was something I never read before. As I mentioned, manga is not generally something I would go to a bookstore and pick up. A memoir manga is definitely out of my comfort zone. Fortunately, this book was actually impressive, given with only 150 pages, Yuna effectively captured her experience and let us readers see a glimpse of what she had gone through.
Yes, some say that manga is simply a Japanese comic book. However, My Journey To Her is definitely something else. She added quirky bits or drawings here and there, yet I felt that I was there with her, trying to hold her hand while suffering through post operation struggles and pains. I found myself stopping midway, closing my eyes, and telepathically telling her that if I only had my ways to be there with her by her bed, I would have.
I learned a lot from the story, not just her own experience but rather how she explained her dysmorphia and even the surgery itself like I was 5. It was simple, yet knowledgeable. I did appreciate her mentioning once or twice to do our own research, acknowledging that she may have a first hand experience but still, her own does not speak to everyone else. The subtle humility from the protagonist herself is very uplifting.
I even found myself in a rabbit hole at 11 PM trying to learn more about gender dysmorphia. I have been living in this world for a few decades now, and I felt ashamed not knowing about it, realizing that a lot of people suffer while I live obliviously. It opened my eyes in a world I never knew existed because of this manga.
I do hope that Yuna writes more about herself, but I know this is quite a stretch. Seeing a glimpse of her life, I got curious about where she is now, how difficult it must have been to follow through medical things even after the procedure. Though I know that it is her choice if she opens another door and let us peek once more into her life. I genuinely hope she is in a better place compared to when she was suffering pre operation.
March 16, 2026
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.
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.
August 6, 2026
Thank you, NetGalley, for the gifted copy!
“My journey to her” is a memoir of a trans woman navigating gender-affirming surgery and coming out to the world as a woman.
Not only is the manga beautifully illustrated, surprisingly funny, and very touching, but I also learned something new about the challenges trans women face to feel comfortable in their bodies and how different cultures treat trans individuals.
I highly recommend it to everyone, and I look forward to researching more about trans people in my country and discovering ways I can help them feel more accepted.
“My journey to her” is a memoir of a trans woman navigating gender-affirming surgery and coming out to the world as a woman.
Not only is the manga beautifully illustrated, surprisingly funny, and very touching, but I also learned something new about the challenges trans women face to feel comfortable in their bodies and how different cultures treat trans individuals.
I highly recommend it to everyone, and I look forward to researching more about trans people in my country and discovering ways I can help them feel more accepted.
August 8, 2026
This manga was such a surprise. It follows a Japanese trans woman's journey through medical and legal transition, including her trip to Thailand for gender affirming surgery.
The story was touching but also way funnier than I expected. I didn't think I'd be laughing while reading something this personal, but it worked. The art was super cute.
I also learned a lot. There were things about the challenges trans women face to feel like themselves that I genuinely didn't know before this book.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!
The story was touching but also way funnier than I expected. I didn't think I'd be laughing while reading something this personal, but it worked. The art was super cute.
I also learned a lot. There were things about the challenges trans women face to feel like themselves that I genuinely didn't know before this book.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!
August 12, 2026
A sweet and informative personal journey following the mangaka, a trans woman, as she medically transitions. It fills my heart seeing other trans people finding happiness and comfort in their bodies, and I really liked how it demystified surgery by going through every step of what she experienced (as well as touching on the unique hurdles Japan has trans people jumping through). Highly recommend it for anyone who needs a reminder that trans joy can still be found, even in other parts of the world.
October 8, 2026
This was a really nice story. Yuna Hirasawa shares her journey of becoming a woman and her gender reaffirmating surgery. This was really heartearming and alot of people never get the chance to feel like themselves and its amazing to read about someones journey. With all the ups and downs included, this story feels raw but still funny, im greatful for all the explanations which helped me fully understand the story.
Thank you to Net Galley and Kodansha Comics for the ARC!!!
Thank you to Net Galley and Kodansha Comics for the ARC!!!
August 7, 2026
A cute manga memoir depicting a Japanese trans woman's experiences with medical and legal transition, including her trip to Thailand for surgery. It's an introduction and uses some terminology that means different things in the US. But it's very sweet even while describing harrowing events and medical traumas.
June 20, 2022
Dieser Manga, in dem Yuna über ihre eigene Erfahrung einer Geschlechtsangleichenden OP berichtet, ist wirklich interessant und ich kann es nur jedem, der mehr über das Thema GIS erfahren will. Ich für meinen Teil bin wieder ein bisschen klüger geworden.
August 2, 2021
Educational, insightful, funny at times. Should be read by every cis person.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Surgery, Sausages, Paperwork, Pork Cutlets, Tuesday
Yuna Hirasawa’s “My Journey to Her” Uses Bodily Comedy, Bureaucratic Anticlimax, and Ordinary Family Chatter to Show That Becoming Yourself Is One Thing and Being Finished Is Another
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | September 29th, 2026
During the last pages of Yuna Hirasawa’s “My Journey to Her,” the book seems to receive the ending memoirists are supposed to envy. The family register has been changed. Friends who momentarily fail to recognize Hirasawa are soon congratulating her. Fireworks begin, the sky obligingly underwriting the metaphor. It is tidy enough to make a suspicious reader nervous. Hirasawa lets the scene have its happiness, then turns the page. Another episode begins with telephone calls to clinics, hormone injections to arrange, a body still changing, laundry still waiting. The joke in the structure is gentle but exact: arrival is real, and still not the same thing as completion.
Even the title proposes a cleaner trajectory than the manga will honor. “My Journey to Her” sounds as though an earlier self stands here and a completed woman waits over there. Hirasawa’s story is less obedient. She begins not with childhood uncertainty but almost at the supposed culmination, already in Thailand for surgery; only on the eve of the operation does the manga fold backward into the two years of psychiatric appointments, public presentation, testing, hormones, family disclosure, and preparation that made the trip possible. The order matters. We meet the woman who boarded the plane before the person who once thought that because society read her body as male, she ought to live as a man. Looking back, Hirasawa calls that earlier route a “pitch-black cave” and imagines diagnosis as an exit. The metaphor is hardly ornate; its usefulness lies in how often the book later complicates it. An exit from one uncertainty keeps depositing her at the mouth of another procedure. From there the book moves through postoperative recovery, return home, court proceedings, changes to Japan’s family register, and the medical maintenance that follows. Surgery is the obvious spectacle. What keeps the book moving is the repeated need to turn private knowledge into something legible elsewhere: clothes a stranger reads, a diagnosis a clinic accepts, anatomy a doctor inspects, a name and gender marker a court can alter.
More revealing than the surgery itself is how little of it Hirasawa can narrate. She is anesthetized; the operation vanishes into a blank. What claims page after page is everything afterward: morphine, drains, intestinal recovery, phantom sensations, dilation, swelling, catheter trouble, hunger, urination. In a 2024 interview with Éditions Glénat, Hirasawa said the manga began as roughly thirty pages about her hospital stay before an editor encouraged her to expand it into a serialization. That origin explains some of the granular medical attention. It also gave her an unexpectedly strong form. The nominally transformative event is compressed into unconsciousness; learning to inhabit its consequences takes time.
Elsewhere Hirasawa finds a wonderfully unserious way to explain something very serious. Vaginoplasty arrives via sausage, tofu, bean curd, quail eggs, and fish cake. She tells the reader that a realistic surgical depiction might be a bit much, then turns groceries into an anatomical model. The gag is not an escape hatch from information. It is how the information gets across. Medical terminology can make a body remote; graphic comedy makes the procedure graspable without pretending that a sausage is a vagina or inviting the reader into surgical voyeurism. The joke does not make the surgery less serious. It prevents seriousness from becoming the only permissible way to look.
The same instinct runs through Hirasawa’s pop-cultural jokes, terrible hospital food, and triumphant farting after intestinal surgery. Pain does not cancel appetite, vanity, irritation, nerdiness, embarrassment, or absurdity. That sounds obvious until one notices how often memoirs of difficult experience quietly turn the narrator into an exemplary patient, survivor, or lesson. Hirasawa keeps wriggling out of that pose. A clinic can see a patient and a court an applicant; the manga keeps recovering the woman who is hungry, mortified, impatient, frightened, grateful, and occasionally preoccupied with whether something tastes awful. She is most convincing when she is least useful as an emblem.
Rather than treating humor as a pressure valve, “My Journey to Her” lets it argue with despair. That becomes clearest in Episode 4, when dilation turns postoperative pain into a timetable. Hirasawa must insert and retain a device in a newly created vaginal canal while still healing, knowing that the space can close if the regimen is not maintained. The sequence then widens from sensation into imagination. Variations of “when I go home to Japan” recur, and each recurrence brings another imagined audience: people who may call her artificial, people who may regard surgery as damage to a healthy body, people who might offer sympathy for an uncontested illness but not for this. “Home” starts as a destination and becomes a screen for anticipated rejection. “My true struggle with gender-affirming surgery,” she concludes, “was in fact a struggle with loneliness.”
In precisely that moment, a phone buzzes and spoils the purity of the thought. Her sister wants her home for an online game. Her sister-in-law imagines food. Her brother proposes a celebratory meal. Soon they are discussing pork cutlets. The change operates through rhythm as much as theme. Hirasawa’s inward repetition is broken by the square, banal arrival of messages from elsewhere. Nobody argues her out of fear. They simply speak as though her return has already been scheduled into ordinary life. Pork cutlets do more emotional work here than a page of affirmation could manage. They do not prove the cruel world imaginary. They give it competition.
Perhaps because the drawings carry so much pressure, Hirasawa’s prose rarely strains for literary distinction. Speech balloons are short and reactive; captions explain; annotations correct or qualify; retrospective Hirasawa occasionally laughs at the woman she was. The division of labor is clean. A face can collapse into panic, a black field can squeeze away visual room, an empty hospital space can make solitude measurable, and oversized effects can turn pain into something the eye has to move around. Words usually tell us what happened. The page decides how near we have to stand.
A weakness follows from the same generosity. Hirasawa has a habit of explaining a thing after the manga has already made it clear. Six “Info Notes” interrupt the sequential narrative with medical, cultural, or legal context. At their most useful, they change the reader’s physical pace: a fast chain of panels gives way to a page that must be stopped over, turning sensation into terminology and recollection into something closer to a field guide.
Particularly after Episode 4, however, the method shows its cost. The “Dilation Lecture” arrives after the manga has already rendered dilation’s pain, repetition, fear, and necessity with considerable force. Its explanatory prose is informative, but some of it feels like a second caption on an image we have already understood. Hirasawa is so determined not to leave an unfamiliar reader behind that she occasionally doubles back for one who was keeping up. Accessibility is one of the book’s virtues; over-insurance is the price it occasionally pays.
A second limitation appears in the family material. Hirasawa’s siblings become vivid through what they do – answer messages, tease her, plan meals, help pull her imagination toward home. Her mother’s reservations receive a few strokes. Her father’s brusque response to the family meeting lands and then recedes. A more inward memoir might stay inside those fractures; Hirasawa does not. The decision keeps the book quick and procedural, but it leaves an imbalance. A catheter crisis receives lavish logistical attention. Some family wounds are allowed almost no afterlife.
Doctors, judges, clerks, and forms give the memoir its deeper argument anyway. Again and again, Hirasawa runs into the difference between knowing herself and being authorized as herself. A psychiatrist does not create her identity, but diagnosis opens or closes medical doors. Surgery does not create womanhood, but it matters to her body and, under the legal regime she records, to recognition by the state. A judge does not make her a woman, but a judge can alter the record that a bank, clinic, or office will treat as fact. The family register is paper until somebody on the other side of a counter believes it.
In the courthouse sequence, Hirasawa arrives carrying an entire courtroom drama in her head. Judgment should look like judgment: a proper chamber, visible ceremony, somebody who unmistakably resembles the person entitled to decide. Instead she is led into something resembling a meeting room. The judge asks whether she is a woman and intends to continue living as one, approves the request, and sends her along. For a beat, Hirasawa does not quite realize that the person she has just met was the judge. Her disappointment is funny because it exposes how much theatrical weight she expected authority to display. The comedy depends on that mismatch: the state does not need robes, grandeur, or even a particularly impressive room to exercise enormous power. Years of appointments, travel, expense, surgery, examinations, and paperwork culminate in an exchange so casual that its smallness becomes unnerving. The state barely raises its voice; the document still changes her life.
Much of that legal machinery now reads as history. Hirasawa records the 2016 Japanese framework, which included a requirement that applicants seeking legal gender recognition lack reproductive function. In 2023, the Supreme Court of Japan held that requirement unconstitutional. The later ruling does not turn Hirasawa’s manga into a legal brief, nor should it. What it does is sharpen the period detail. A bodily demand presented in the memoir as part of the route to recognition was later found constitutionally impermissible. The bureaucracy aged faster than the scene did.
If this history tempts a critic to make Hirasawa into an anti-institutional heroine, the book refuses the promotion. She wants the diagnosis when it helps name what she could not name. She wants surgery. She wants the family register changed. “Finally” is one of her important words, and she means it. When the amended register recognizes her as a daughter, the achievement is neither false consciousness nor a rhetorical trap waiting to be dismantled. A destination can matter enormously without becoming a terminus. That distinction keeps the book harder, and better, than an argument about liberation from categories would be.
The word “finally” also makes what follows more interesting. Soon after legal recognition, Hirasawa starts asking what “normal” actually means and whether the world’s gender categories might themselves be strange. In the Afterword she calls that question “everything this book is about.” Yet the manga’s scenes have been more exact than this philosophy. Doctors, strangers, anatomy, forms, judges, and clinics show how normality is enforced in practice; the universal question smooths those differences into something almost too portable. Hirasawa is at her smartest when a counter, a wound, or a piece of paper bears the thought for her.
Rather than finish on that question, Episode 7 goes out under fireworks. Friends almost fail to recognize Hirasawa, then do, in both senses. Congratulations arrive. The sky supplies the full stop. Kodansha’s original bibliographic record makes the next move especially revealing: Episodes 1 through 7 were the serialized run, while Episode 8 was newly drawn for the collected volume. Hirasawa did not merely have leftover material after a convenient finale. In turning the serialization into a book, she chose to draw the part after the applause.
On the next page, the telephone starts ringing. Hirasawa is looking for a clinic that will continue her estrogen injections. She has undergone surgery. Her legal gender marker is female. Clinics still refuse her. From there the chapter wanders through diminished strength, disappointment with parts of her body, cooking, laundry, irritability, emotional fluctuation, bills, and the stubborn need for ongoing care. None of it cancels the fireworks. That is why it works. Happiness was true. Maintenance is also true. The great transition does not produce an ending. It produces Tuesday.
Perhaps the book’s quietest answer to all those institutions is a note written before Hirasawa leaves the Thai hospital. She looks up enough Thai to thank the nurses for specific acts: caring for her, encouraging her, wiping her body, holding her hand. The list is almost childishly plain, which is precisely why it works. The verbs refuse abstraction. During the urinary crisis, a nurse who cannot converse with Hirasawa simply stays beside her and holds that same hand; later Hirasawa must cross the language barrier in the opposite direction, turning gratitude into words she has had to look up. For a memoir driven by self-determination, “My Journey to Her” is strikingly unseduced by fantasies of self-sufficiency. Agency here requires drivers, interpreters, siblings, nurses, doctors, clerks, money, phones, and people willing to answer them.
Of its literary neighbors, Nagata Kabi’s “My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness” comes closest to Hirasawa’s use of bodily embarrassment as knowledge, though Nagata burrows more relentlessly inward while Hirasawa keeps colliding with procedures and offices. Chii’s “The Bride Was a Boy” is a nearer subject comp, but Hirasawa is less interested in romantic or domestic culmination than in the medical and administrative afterlife of transition. Those comparisons are useful chiefly because they prevent the accessible art and genial comedy from being mistaken for simplicity.
Under the clean linework, scale does a good deal of the thinking. Faces dominate when embarrassment or pain spikes; backgrounds thin or vanish; black fields can choke the page. When institutions become the subject, rooms, streets, counters, beds, and waiting areas return, giving the person a measurable relation to the apparatus around her. The drawings are not consistently beautiful in any lavish sense, and the finish can be rough, but polish is not the primary achievement. Hirasawa knows when a face should collapse into caricature, when an open room should make solitude visible, when typography should occupy the space like a sensation, and when sequential movement should stop altogether for an explanatory block. Her visual grammar is not showy. It is practical in the best sense: each device has a job, and the strongest pages know exactly how much of the page that job should take.
Limitations substantial enough to matter remain visible. The explanatory apparatus sometimes repeats what the manga has already established. Secondary relationships are thinner than the medical ordeal. The broad rhetoric of “normality” is less incisive than the scenes that motivate it. The drawing is effective more consistently than it is exceptional. Those costs put the book at 85/100, or 4/5 stars: strong, distinctive, and in several passages excellent, without needing subject matter or good intentions to do any of the grading.
One quieter revision of the usual single-climax transition story runs beneath all this. Hirasawa begins with concrete goals and discovers that each solves the problem it can solve. Surgery changes her body in ways she wanted. The family register changes what institutions can record. Neither abolishes medical dependence, loneliness, bills, other people’s perceptions, or laundry. The book does not argue that resolution is fake. It argues, almost despite itself, that resolution has a scale. A document can solve a document problem. It cannot finish a life.
She ends by noticing another trans woman at the clinic, sitting apart, apparently trying not to be noticed. Hirasawa reads uncertainty in her posture and voice and silently wishes her well. The gesture is not pure enlightenment: she is reading another person from the outside, the same outward process that has hurt her when performed carelessly. That slight discomfort should remain. Hirasawa has not acquired universal knowledge. She has acquired memory, and memory makes her attention gentler. The “her” at the end of the journey is not a perfected woman waiting beyond the final gate. She is still moving through appointments and ordinary days, and now she can see another traveler without mistaking either of them for the destination.
Yuna Hirasawa’s “My Journey to Her” Uses Bodily Comedy, Bureaucratic Anticlimax, and Ordinary Family Chatter to Show That Becoming Yourself Is One Thing and Being Finished Is Another
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | September 29th, 2026
During the last pages of Yuna Hirasawa’s “My Journey to Her,” the book seems to receive the ending memoirists are supposed to envy. The family register has been changed. Friends who momentarily fail to recognize Hirasawa are soon congratulating her. Fireworks begin, the sky obligingly underwriting the metaphor. It is tidy enough to make a suspicious reader nervous. Hirasawa lets the scene have its happiness, then turns the page. Another episode begins with telephone calls to clinics, hormone injections to arrange, a body still changing, laundry still waiting. The joke in the structure is gentle but exact: arrival is real, and still not the same thing as completion.
Even the title proposes a cleaner trajectory than the manga will honor. “My Journey to Her” sounds as though an earlier self stands here and a completed woman waits over there. Hirasawa’s story is less obedient. She begins not with childhood uncertainty but almost at the supposed culmination, already in Thailand for surgery; only on the eve of the operation does the manga fold backward into the two years of psychiatric appointments, public presentation, testing, hormones, family disclosure, and preparation that made the trip possible. The order matters. We meet the woman who boarded the plane before the person who once thought that because society read her body as male, she ought to live as a man. Looking back, Hirasawa calls that earlier route a “pitch-black cave” and imagines diagnosis as an exit. The metaphor is hardly ornate; its usefulness lies in how often the book later complicates it. An exit from one uncertainty keeps depositing her at the mouth of another procedure. From there the book moves through postoperative recovery, return home, court proceedings, changes to Japan’s family register, and the medical maintenance that follows. Surgery is the obvious spectacle. What keeps the book moving is the repeated need to turn private knowledge into something legible elsewhere: clothes a stranger reads, a diagnosis a clinic accepts, anatomy a doctor inspects, a name and gender marker a court can alter.
More revealing than the surgery itself is how little of it Hirasawa can narrate. She is anesthetized; the operation vanishes into a blank. What claims page after page is everything afterward: morphine, drains, intestinal recovery, phantom sensations, dilation, swelling, catheter trouble, hunger, urination. In a 2024 interview with Éditions Glénat, Hirasawa said the manga began as roughly thirty pages about her hospital stay before an editor encouraged her to expand it into a serialization. That origin explains some of the granular medical attention. It also gave her an unexpectedly strong form. The nominally transformative event is compressed into unconsciousness; learning to inhabit its consequences takes time.
Elsewhere Hirasawa finds a wonderfully unserious way to explain something very serious. Vaginoplasty arrives via sausage, tofu, bean curd, quail eggs, and fish cake. She tells the reader that a realistic surgical depiction might be a bit much, then turns groceries into an anatomical model. The gag is not an escape hatch from information. It is how the information gets across. Medical terminology can make a body remote; graphic comedy makes the procedure graspable without pretending that a sausage is a vagina or inviting the reader into surgical voyeurism. The joke does not make the surgery less serious. It prevents seriousness from becoming the only permissible way to look.
The same instinct runs through Hirasawa’s pop-cultural jokes, terrible hospital food, and triumphant farting after intestinal surgery. Pain does not cancel appetite, vanity, irritation, nerdiness, embarrassment, or absurdity. That sounds obvious until one notices how often memoirs of difficult experience quietly turn the narrator into an exemplary patient, survivor, or lesson. Hirasawa keeps wriggling out of that pose. A clinic can see a patient and a court an applicant; the manga keeps recovering the woman who is hungry, mortified, impatient, frightened, grateful, and occasionally preoccupied with whether something tastes awful. She is most convincing when she is least useful as an emblem.
Rather than treating humor as a pressure valve, “My Journey to Her” lets it argue with despair. That becomes clearest in Episode 4, when dilation turns postoperative pain into a timetable. Hirasawa must insert and retain a device in a newly created vaginal canal while still healing, knowing that the space can close if the regimen is not maintained. The sequence then widens from sensation into imagination. Variations of “when I go home to Japan” recur, and each recurrence brings another imagined audience: people who may call her artificial, people who may regard surgery as damage to a healthy body, people who might offer sympathy for an uncontested illness but not for this. “Home” starts as a destination and becomes a screen for anticipated rejection. “My true struggle with gender-affirming surgery,” she concludes, “was in fact a struggle with loneliness.”
In precisely that moment, a phone buzzes and spoils the purity of the thought. Her sister wants her home for an online game. Her sister-in-law imagines food. Her brother proposes a celebratory meal. Soon they are discussing pork cutlets. The change operates through rhythm as much as theme. Hirasawa’s inward repetition is broken by the square, banal arrival of messages from elsewhere. Nobody argues her out of fear. They simply speak as though her return has already been scheduled into ordinary life. Pork cutlets do more emotional work here than a page of affirmation could manage. They do not prove the cruel world imaginary. They give it competition.
Perhaps because the drawings carry so much pressure, Hirasawa’s prose rarely strains for literary distinction. Speech balloons are short and reactive; captions explain; annotations correct or qualify; retrospective Hirasawa occasionally laughs at the woman she was. The division of labor is clean. A face can collapse into panic, a black field can squeeze away visual room, an empty hospital space can make solitude measurable, and oversized effects can turn pain into something the eye has to move around. Words usually tell us what happened. The page decides how near we have to stand.
A weakness follows from the same generosity. Hirasawa has a habit of explaining a thing after the manga has already made it clear. Six “Info Notes” interrupt the sequential narrative with medical, cultural, or legal context. At their most useful, they change the reader’s physical pace: a fast chain of panels gives way to a page that must be stopped over, turning sensation into terminology and recollection into something closer to a field guide.
Particularly after Episode 4, however, the method shows its cost. The “Dilation Lecture” arrives after the manga has already rendered dilation’s pain, repetition, fear, and necessity with considerable force. Its explanatory prose is informative, but some of it feels like a second caption on an image we have already understood. Hirasawa is so determined not to leave an unfamiliar reader behind that she occasionally doubles back for one who was keeping up. Accessibility is one of the book’s virtues; over-insurance is the price it occasionally pays.
A second limitation appears in the family material. Hirasawa’s siblings become vivid through what they do – answer messages, tease her, plan meals, help pull her imagination toward home. Her mother’s reservations receive a few strokes. Her father’s brusque response to the family meeting lands and then recedes. A more inward memoir might stay inside those fractures; Hirasawa does not. The decision keeps the book quick and procedural, but it leaves an imbalance. A catheter crisis receives lavish logistical attention. Some family wounds are allowed almost no afterlife.
Doctors, judges, clerks, and forms give the memoir its deeper argument anyway. Again and again, Hirasawa runs into the difference between knowing herself and being authorized as herself. A psychiatrist does not create her identity, but diagnosis opens or closes medical doors. Surgery does not create womanhood, but it matters to her body and, under the legal regime she records, to recognition by the state. A judge does not make her a woman, but a judge can alter the record that a bank, clinic, or office will treat as fact. The family register is paper until somebody on the other side of a counter believes it.
In the courthouse sequence, Hirasawa arrives carrying an entire courtroom drama in her head. Judgment should look like judgment: a proper chamber, visible ceremony, somebody who unmistakably resembles the person entitled to decide. Instead she is led into something resembling a meeting room. The judge asks whether she is a woman and intends to continue living as one, approves the request, and sends her along. For a beat, Hirasawa does not quite realize that the person she has just met was the judge. Her disappointment is funny because it exposes how much theatrical weight she expected authority to display. The comedy depends on that mismatch: the state does not need robes, grandeur, or even a particularly impressive room to exercise enormous power. Years of appointments, travel, expense, surgery, examinations, and paperwork culminate in an exchange so casual that its smallness becomes unnerving. The state barely raises its voice; the document still changes her life.
Much of that legal machinery now reads as history. Hirasawa records the 2016 Japanese framework, which included a requirement that applicants seeking legal gender recognition lack reproductive function. In 2023, the Supreme Court of Japan held that requirement unconstitutional. The later ruling does not turn Hirasawa’s manga into a legal brief, nor should it. What it does is sharpen the period detail. A bodily demand presented in the memoir as part of the route to recognition was later found constitutionally impermissible. The bureaucracy aged faster than the scene did.
If this history tempts a critic to make Hirasawa into an anti-institutional heroine, the book refuses the promotion. She wants the diagnosis when it helps name what she could not name. She wants surgery. She wants the family register changed. “Finally” is one of her important words, and she means it. When the amended register recognizes her as a daughter, the achievement is neither false consciousness nor a rhetorical trap waiting to be dismantled. A destination can matter enormously without becoming a terminus. That distinction keeps the book harder, and better, than an argument about liberation from categories would be.
The word “finally” also makes what follows more interesting. Soon after legal recognition, Hirasawa starts asking what “normal” actually means and whether the world’s gender categories might themselves be strange. In the Afterword she calls that question “everything this book is about.” Yet the manga’s scenes have been more exact than this philosophy. Doctors, strangers, anatomy, forms, judges, and clinics show how normality is enforced in practice; the universal question smooths those differences into something almost too portable. Hirasawa is at her smartest when a counter, a wound, or a piece of paper bears the thought for her.
Rather than finish on that question, Episode 7 goes out under fireworks. Friends almost fail to recognize Hirasawa, then do, in both senses. Congratulations arrive. The sky supplies the full stop. Kodansha’s original bibliographic record makes the next move especially revealing: Episodes 1 through 7 were the serialized run, while Episode 8 was newly drawn for the collected volume. Hirasawa did not merely have leftover material after a convenient finale. In turning the serialization into a book, she chose to draw the part after the applause.
On the next page, the telephone starts ringing. Hirasawa is looking for a clinic that will continue her estrogen injections. She has undergone surgery. Her legal gender marker is female. Clinics still refuse her. From there the chapter wanders through diminished strength, disappointment with parts of her body, cooking, laundry, irritability, emotional fluctuation, bills, and the stubborn need for ongoing care. None of it cancels the fireworks. That is why it works. Happiness was true. Maintenance is also true. The great transition does not produce an ending. It produces Tuesday.
Perhaps the book’s quietest answer to all those institutions is a note written before Hirasawa leaves the Thai hospital. She looks up enough Thai to thank the nurses for specific acts: caring for her, encouraging her, wiping her body, holding her hand. The list is almost childishly plain, which is precisely why it works. The verbs refuse abstraction. During the urinary crisis, a nurse who cannot converse with Hirasawa simply stays beside her and holds that same hand; later Hirasawa must cross the language barrier in the opposite direction, turning gratitude into words she has had to look up. For a memoir driven by self-determination, “My Journey to Her” is strikingly unseduced by fantasies of self-sufficiency. Agency here requires drivers, interpreters, siblings, nurses, doctors, clerks, money, phones, and people willing to answer them.
Of its literary neighbors, Nagata Kabi’s “My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness” comes closest to Hirasawa’s use of bodily embarrassment as knowledge, though Nagata burrows more relentlessly inward while Hirasawa keeps colliding with procedures and offices. Chii’s “The Bride Was a Boy” is a nearer subject comp, but Hirasawa is less interested in romantic or domestic culmination than in the medical and administrative afterlife of transition. Those comparisons are useful chiefly because they prevent the accessible art and genial comedy from being mistaken for simplicity.
Under the clean linework, scale does a good deal of the thinking. Faces dominate when embarrassment or pain spikes; backgrounds thin or vanish; black fields can choke the page. When institutions become the subject, rooms, streets, counters, beds, and waiting areas return, giving the person a measurable relation to the apparatus around her. The drawings are not consistently beautiful in any lavish sense, and the finish can be rough, but polish is not the primary achievement. Hirasawa knows when a face should collapse into caricature, when an open room should make solitude visible, when typography should occupy the space like a sensation, and when sequential movement should stop altogether for an explanatory block. Her visual grammar is not showy. It is practical in the best sense: each device has a job, and the strongest pages know exactly how much of the page that job should take.
Limitations substantial enough to matter remain visible. The explanatory apparatus sometimes repeats what the manga has already established. Secondary relationships are thinner than the medical ordeal. The broad rhetoric of “normality” is less incisive than the scenes that motivate it. The drawing is effective more consistently than it is exceptional. Those costs put the book at 85/100, or 4/5 stars: strong, distinctive, and in several passages excellent, without needing subject matter or good intentions to do any of the grading.
One quieter revision of the usual single-climax transition story runs beneath all this. Hirasawa begins with concrete goals and discovers that each solves the problem it can solve. Surgery changes her body in ways she wanted. The family register changes what institutions can record. Neither abolishes medical dependence, loneliness, bills, other people’s perceptions, or laundry. The book does not argue that resolution is fake. It argues, almost despite itself, that resolution has a scale. A document can solve a document problem. It cannot finish a life.
She ends by noticing another trans woman at the clinic, sitting apart, apparently trying not to be noticed. Hirasawa reads uncertainty in her posture and voice and silently wishes her well. The gesture is not pure enlightenment: she is reading another person from the outside, the same outward process that has hurt her when performed carelessly. That slight discomfort should remain. Hirasawa has not acquired universal knowledge. She has acquired memory, and memory makes her attention gentler. The “her” at the end of the journey is not a perfected woman waiting beyond the final gate. She is still moving through appointments and ordinary days, and now she can see another traveler without mistaking either of them for the destination.
September 2, 2025
A recounting of all of the challenges that one person faced in her transition, especially the gender affirming surgery. Like many manga, its aim is to teach as well as tell the story, so there are informative notes at the end of every episode.
May 31, 2025
Intriguing to see more of the transfem experience in Japan and Thailand. This autobiography covers a similar surgical journey as shown in The Bride Was a Boy, with extra supplemental information (assisting companies that help you book every thing for your surgery and recovery, hospital attendants zipping around on roller skates, post surgery recovery when part of the intestine is removed and used in vaginoplasty! And then sticking rods in the vagina so it doesn't close up like a wound after surgery!)And the technique of checking how well you pass which made me realize just how gendered some things in Japan are (and has me wondering how distressing it must be to an enby X-gender and being misgendered in both directions).
Plus there's a neat little concrete example here for the argument "when trans rights are prioritized, cis rights also improve." The narrator encounters a trans woman with facial hair in Thailand, then notices there are cis women that haven't bothered with removing their facial hair and concludes "must be more socially acceptable here not to do that."
At the end the author notes that she tried to be objective in her writing, that is to say she tried to convey what happened factually and her honest emotions about it all, without trying to make it into a greater lesson about how we should treat others (trans or otherwise). She felt that this would be the approach likely to reach most readers and that she needed to put aside the desire for complete acceptance from everyone, and I do feel she succeeded at her goal as well as anybody could have. Of course, that's not to say that bad faith actors won't be able to pick these up and have a moral panic, just that they will look more the fool for their reaction.
Looking forward to seeing this in print!
Plus there's a neat little concrete example here for the argument "when trans rights are prioritized, cis rights also improve." The narrator encounters a trans woman with facial hair in Thailand, then notices there are cis women that haven't bothered with removing their facial hair and concludes "must be more socially acceptable here not to do that."
At the end the author notes that she tried to be objective in her writing, that is to say she tried to convey what happened factually and her honest emotions about it all, without trying to make it into a greater lesson about how we should treat others (trans or otherwise). She felt that this would be the approach likely to reach most readers and that she needed to put aside the desire for complete acceptance from everyone, and I do feel she succeeded at her goal as well as anybody could have. Of course, that's not to say that bad faith actors won't be able to pick these up and have a moral panic, just that they will look more the fool for their reaction.
Looking forward to seeing this in print!
June 4, 2025
Wow, wow, wow. This is my first in-depth learning experience of how gender affirming surgery works for some individuals (assuming that certain countries handle things differently) and it was interesting to see all of the steps that needed to be taken in Japan to achieve such a transition.
Although this was an informative narration, there were still moments of humor I enjoyed. When Yuna depicted describing how the surgery worked while using food items, I couldn’t stop giggling at the reaction of one of her friends. Seeing the guys instantly grab their crotches was top tier comedy.
It was also intriguing to hear about the healing process. Having to hear about dilators made me cringe (absolutely no one likes them) but some of her experiences were relatable to my own. Even during a checkup with her surgeon, hearing him ask her to scoot down made me giggle because….why do all doctors need us to be near falling off the table for them to perform their checkups. It’s insane.
Japan seems to have made way more progress legally in accepting LGBTQIA+ folks, and I appreciated that many of the facts were given with the caveat that these things were true at the time but may have changed. I imagine depicting one’s gender affirming surgery to be a very intimate and personal experience, and I’m happy to have a glimpse of what mangaka Yuna wanted to share. While I would love to read more stories with topics such as gender affirming care and such, it’s insensitive to expect humans to bare their souls to an already judgmental crowd. But, I’d like to see if pop up in fictional stories, given that the writer did adequate research.
Thanks so much to Kodansha for the DRC. Starting off pride month strong in the publishing land.
Although this was an informative narration, there were still moments of humor I enjoyed. When Yuna depicted describing how the surgery worked while using food items, I couldn’t stop giggling at the reaction of one of her friends. Seeing the guys instantly grab their crotches was top tier comedy.
It was also intriguing to hear about the healing process. Having to hear about dilators made me cringe (absolutely no one likes them) but some of her experiences were relatable to my own. Even during a checkup with her surgeon, hearing him ask her to scoot down made me giggle because….why do all doctors need us to be near falling off the table for them to perform their checkups. It’s insane.
Japan seems to have made way more progress legally in accepting LGBTQIA+ folks, and I appreciated that many of the facts were given with the caveat that these things were true at the time but may have changed. I imagine depicting one’s gender affirming surgery to be a very intimate and personal experience, and I’m happy to have a glimpse of what mangaka Yuna wanted to share. While I would love to read more stories with topics such as gender affirming care and such, it’s insensitive to expect humans to bare their souls to an already judgmental crowd. But, I’d like to see if pop up in fictional stories, given that the writer did adequate research.
Thanks so much to Kodansha for the DRC. Starting off pride month strong in the publishing land.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 8, 2025
Thanks to Kodansha Comics and NetGalley for the ARC.
“My Journey To Her” by Yūna Hirasawa was the perfect book to read at the start of Pride Month.
Detailing the process that the author went through in her experience with gender dysphoria, gender-affirming medical care, and the subsequent legal processes to be recognized by her preferred gender.
This type of story is one that I have read many times before. As someone who seeks out LGBTQA+ stories, I have encountered stories similar to this one. Yet, to say this feels incredibly inauthentic to the unique aspects present in this manga.
I truly wish this could be a story I could put in the hands of many bigoted or uninformed individuals. The authorial voice used throughout is both humorous and incredibly informative. This culminated towards a demystification and humanization of a process that many find scandalous and confusing. Not only does the story help others understand the perspective of someone experiencing gender dysphoria, but it also shows exactly what is involved when someone decides to make a physical transition. Much care was put into explaining the process in an accurate and precise manner.
For me, particularly interesting were the details surround the legal process involved, both in Thailand and Japan. Even as someone who understood the medical procedures involved, I was kept engaged by these details and considering how they different from those in the United States.
This is all to say, there is something for everyone to enjoy in this book. Informative, personal, and full of self-love. Highly recommend.
“My Journey To Her” by Yūna Hirasawa was the perfect book to read at the start of Pride Month.
Detailing the process that the author went through in her experience with gender dysphoria, gender-affirming medical care, and the subsequent legal processes to be recognized by her preferred gender.
This type of story is one that I have read many times before. As someone who seeks out LGBTQA+ stories, I have encountered stories similar to this one. Yet, to say this feels incredibly inauthentic to the unique aspects present in this manga.
I truly wish this could be a story I could put in the hands of many bigoted or uninformed individuals. The authorial voice used throughout is both humorous and incredibly informative. This culminated towards a demystification and humanization of a process that many find scandalous and confusing. Not only does the story help others understand the perspective of someone experiencing gender dysphoria, but it also shows exactly what is involved when someone decides to make a physical transition. Much care was put into explaining the process in an accurate and precise manner.
For me, particularly interesting were the details surround the legal process involved, both in Thailand and Japan. Even as someone who understood the medical procedures involved, I was kept engaged by these details and considering how they different from those in the United States.
This is all to say, there is something for everyone to enjoy in this book. Informative, personal, and full of self-love. Highly recommend.
August 5, 2025
Before anything else, I'd like to make it clear that my rating is subjective and that it's necessary to discover this title in order to be informed!
This is an autobiographical story about the author's journey through gender transition. And I was pleasantly surprised! It was very thorough in terms of details and things I didn't know, even though I'm quite curious about queer causes. I thought I knew all about it through social networks and other stories, but this one was really interesting because you can feel how difficult it is for people to transition without artifice. No attempt is made to explain, but rather to educate! And for me, that's the strength of this manga, because we really learn through the difficulties, but also through the joy.
In short, I can't really judge this manga, as it's essential to discover.
-_-_-_
Avant toutes choses, je tiens à préciser que ma note est subjective et qu'il est nécessaire de découvrir ce titre pour s'informer !
On est sur un récit autobiographique sur l'autrice qui parle de son parcours dans sa transition de genre. Et j'ai été agréablement surprise ! C'était hyper poussée en terme de détail et choses que je ne connaissais pas alors que je suis plutôt curieuses sur les causes queer. Je pensais m'y connaître à travers les réseaux sociaux et autres récits mais celui ci est vraiment intéressant car on sent la difficulté des personnes en transition sans artifices. On ne cherche pas à nous expliquer mais plutôt à nous éduquer ! Et pour moi c'est la force de ce manga car on apprend réellement à travers les difficultés mais aussi la joie.
En bref, je ne peux pas vraiment juger ce manga car il est essentiel à découvrir
This is an autobiographical story about the author's journey through gender transition. And I was pleasantly surprised! It was very thorough in terms of details and things I didn't know, even though I'm quite curious about queer causes. I thought I knew all about it through social networks and other stories, but this one was really interesting because you can feel how difficult it is for people to transition without artifice. No attempt is made to explain, but rather to educate! And for me, that's the strength of this manga, because we really learn through the difficulties, but also through the joy.
In short, I can't really judge this manga, as it's essential to discover.
-_-_-_
Avant toutes choses, je tiens à préciser que ma note est subjective et qu'il est nécessaire de découvrir ce titre pour s'informer !
On est sur un récit autobiographique sur l'autrice qui parle de son parcours dans sa transition de genre. Et j'ai été agréablement surprise ! C'était hyper poussée en terme de détail et choses que je ne connaissais pas alors que je suis plutôt curieuses sur les causes queer. Je pensais m'y connaître à travers les réseaux sociaux et autres récits mais celui ci est vraiment intéressant car on sent la difficulté des personnes en transition sans artifices. On ne cherche pas à nous expliquer mais plutôt à nous éduquer ! Et pour moi c'est la force de ce manga car on apprend réellement à travers les difficultés mais aussi la joie.
En bref, je ne peux pas vraiment juger ce manga car il est essentiel à découvrir
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