Barefoot Gen, Volume One: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima by Keiji Nakazawa"No matter how often you're stepped on, grow up tall and strong, through the wind and snow."
-- Gen's mother
Nakazawa takes us into an ordinary urban Japanese neighborhood in the summer of 1945. As Japan loses the war, everyone becomes more anxious, and families are ripped apart as young ones are sent to the countryside, older sons are all drafted into suicidal service, and all food and money become scarce. And yet, anti-war feelings are rare in what is now a police state, making the protagonist's anti-war father a martyr for an endangered value.
The story of Gen Nakaoka and his little family reminds us of the limits the honest poor can reach when a nation at war absorbs too many resources; the rarity of such conscience is always saddening, yet the persistence of the voice is reassuring, and the expansive treatment of the basic tensions of a boy who must grow up in war and its aftermath seems a beautiful and worthwhile project -- I look forward to digesting the next 9 volumes, slowly, as I read the poetry of Du Fu:
This winter...they haven't released the Guanxi troops
but officials still press for the land tax.
Land taxes! How are we to pay that?
The truth is it's a sour thing to have sons.
Better to have a daughter—
at least she can marry a neighbor.
Our sons lie unburied in the grass.
My lord, have you seen the
Blue Sea's shore where the old white bones lie ungathered?
New ghosts keen and old ghosts weep
jiu, jiu like twittering birds as rain sifts from the bleak sky.
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