Kouno Fumiyo - Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (Eng. trans.)
This is a slim volume about the aftermath of the atomic bomb on ordinary people, one being a woman in the Hiroshima of 1955, and one being a girl in present-day Japan. It's beautifully written and drawn; the art style seems to be less typically "manga" (whatever that means) for those of you who don't generally read manga; and Kouno does some particularly interesting things with the play between dialogue and picture.
The tone of the manga is very slice-of-life-ish: gentle and sweet and every day. Of course, that makes the references to Hiroshima even more gut-wrenching. My favorite panel was a man and a woman hugging or kissing on a bridge, with the ghosts of the dead strewn over the bridge and clogging up the river beneath them, present day and past experiences colliding, the specters of the dead forever there.
I have a very complicated reaction to the manga, though. It does what it wants to do extremely well, and if that were all, I'd be shoving this in everyone's hands. But, as it were, I keep thinking about a Japanese film class I took, in which we watched Grave of the Fireflies and the professor asked if the focus on the protagonist and his sister suffering from the war was fair, given the atrocities that the Japanese army was responsible for. Back then, I thought it was fair.
Now, I still think it is a valid and a necessary portrayal, but my reaction is complicated by Japanese textbook omissions of the Rape of Nanking, the colonization of Korea, and the treatment of comfort women; by attempts to shift the blame of wartime atrocities to the generals, which I don't mind, and focus on how the Japanese people were duped by their leaders, which I do mind; by Koizumi's visit to a shrine honoring the Japanese soldiers of WWII, which I am conflicted about; by how hibakusha are still discriminated against and disproportionately suffer; and by how Japan's actions affect the well-being and livelihood of Japanese people living elsewhere (internment and ostracization).
To put it more clearly, I do not think any Japanese civilians (or soldiers, even) "deserved" anything, particularly not something on the scale of the atomic bomb. And yet, I am constantly afraid of how history can so easily be overwritten and changed, how much easier it is to document suffering something as opposed to inflicting suffering on others, how we all edit the past to make it more palatable. All this is further complicated by my being from Taiwan but never having experienced Japanese occupation and by my consumption of tons of Japanese pop culture.
I don't know enough to say whether or not Kouno is doing this; right now, I am inclined to say not. But.
Note: please, no discussion on whether or not the atomic bomb was called for.
The tone of the manga is very slice-of-life-ish: gentle and sweet and every day. Of course, that makes the references to Hiroshima even more gut-wrenching. My favorite panel was a man and a woman hugging or kissing on a bridge, with the ghosts of the dead strewn over the bridge and clogging up the river beneath them, present day and past experiences colliding, the specters of the dead forever there.
I have a very complicated reaction to the manga, though. It does what it wants to do extremely well, and if that were all, I'd be shoving this in everyone's hands. But, as it were, I keep thinking about a Japanese film class I took, in which we watched Grave of the Fireflies and the professor asked if the focus on the protagonist and his sister suffering from the war was fair, given the atrocities that the Japanese army was responsible for. Back then, I thought it was fair.
Now, I still think it is a valid and a necessary portrayal, but my reaction is complicated by Japanese textbook omissions of the Rape of Nanking, the colonization of Korea, and the treatment of comfort women; by attempts to shift the blame of wartime atrocities to the generals, which I don't mind, and focus on how the Japanese people were duped by their leaders, which I do mind; by Koizumi's visit to a shrine honoring the Japanese soldiers of WWII, which I am conflicted about; by how hibakusha are still discriminated against and disproportionately suffer; and by how Japan's actions affect the well-being and livelihood of Japanese people living elsewhere (internment and ostracization).
To put it more clearly, I do not think any Japanese civilians (or soldiers, even) "deserved" anything, particularly not something on the scale of the atomic bomb. And yet, I am constantly afraid of how history can so easily be overwritten and changed, how much easier it is to document suffering something as opposed to inflicting suffering on others, how we all edit the past to make it more palatable. All this is further complicated by my being from Taiwan but never having experienced Japanese occupation and by my consumption of tons of Japanese pop culture.
I don't know enough to say whether or not Kouno is doing this; right now, I am inclined to say not. But.
Note: please, no discussion on whether or not the atomic bomb was called for.