On the Coffee Table: The Day After

Title: Barefoot Gen, Volume 2: The Day After
Writer and Artist: Keiji Nakazawa

via Goodreads

Barefoot Gen is a semi-autobiographical manga series about the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath.  I shared my thoughts on Volume 1 here.  The story is powerful and deeply personal.  Any doubts one might have that sequential art (a.k.a. comic books) can tackle serious subject matter will be profoundly challenged by this series.

Volume 1 ended with the bomb dropping.  Volume 2 begins with Gen and his mother struggling to piece their lives back together on the most basic level.  Gen's father, older sister and younger brother were all killed when their house collapsed.  Gen's mother went into labor in the midst of the horrible day and there is now a baby sister who will starve if the family can't find food.  In the desperate search for sustenance, Gen is confronted with horrors at every turn: skin falling off of burn victims as they wander the streets; others suffering from sudden, mysterious ailments we know in historical hindsight resulted from radiation sickness; corpses everywhere.  No fictional post-apocalypse can compare.

The series is difficult reading.  Cruelty is a prevalent theme in this second book, on both macro and micro levels.  The devastation of nuclear war is clearly so much worse than what I can conceive of intellectually.  The high quality of the work would probably be enough to keep me coming back but I also feel a responsibility as a human being to learn from the sins of history. 

On the Coffee Table: Barefoot Gen

Title: Barefoot Gen, Volume 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima
Writer and Artist: Keiji Nakazawa

via Atomic Books

If ever there were a single day that changed the world, it was most certainly August 6, 1945.  On that horrific Monday morning, an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima, Japan, killing thousands, leveling the city and raising the stakes of warfare forever.  Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen series, first published in Japanese in the early '70s, is the semi-autobiographical account of the author's childhood experiences before, during and after the bombing.  It is a powerful work of high stature among the world's serious subject comic books.

Volume 1 begins in April 1945 and ends on the day of the bomb.  The hardships of the average Japanese family during the late stages of the war are laid plain.  Gen, a young boy and fictional stand-in for the author, and his family live under constant air raid threat while struggling to even feed themselves.  One older brother is evacuated to the countryside.  Another enlists in pilot training and learns the horrors of kamikaze pilots.  To complicate matters further, Gen's father is openly critical of Japan's involvement in the war, a position that inspires vicious hostility from the neighbors. 

Rambunctious little boys in manga often seem to bounce and Gen and his brother Shinji come off as a bit clownish at times.  The father's occasional violent outbursts are off-putting.  But overall, the reader develops great affection for Gen's family in plenty of time for the crushing blow we all know is coming.  We are not spared the graphic details when the bomb hits - skin melting off the victims, bodies covered with shards of shattered glass, etc.

I never made it to Hiroshima during my time in Japan, though I did go to Nagasaki, target of the second A-bomb on August 9th.  Visiting the bomb museum was a haunting experience I'll carry with me always.  Fortunately, both cities thrive in modern Japan and have been at the forefront of world peace and nuclear antiproliferation movements for decades - always aware of the horrifying past, but also determined to help make sure it never happens again.  First person accounts such as Nakazawa's have long been an important aspect of these efforts.