Required Reading: Barefoot Gen

If there's a single Manga that I could point to and say that it has had a profound impact on me, it would have to be Barefoot Gen. I'm not quite sure if I can really express the impact of this book, but I'm going to try. Because as far as I'm concerned this is a book that NEEDS to be read.

I first discovered this book in, of all places, school. Back in the day (when steam powered dinosaurs ruled the earth and we ate rocks for breakfast) before I'd even heard of the word Manga. I was in the library, at lunchtime, going through the Asterix and Tintin books for something to read when I found it. 2 Volumes of Barefoot Gen. So I naively picked one up and read it. Only I couldn't actually read it all the way through. I had to go for a breathe of fresh air before I could face finishing them. I was still young then, and far less inured to the horrors on offer than I later became (I couldn't handle Tesuo the first time either).

The story is fairly straightfoward. It follows the life of Gen and is family, in the closing days of world war 2. They live in Hiroshima.

You can see where this is going.

There's just something about the straightforward way the horrors of the bomb are depicted. I'd never before seen anything quite like it. Even now I find it disturbing. It's.... unflinching? The whole point of the book is basically to bring home to the reader the magnitude of human suffering involved, and I think this goal is acheived. I think the simple fact that this is a semi autobiographical work is what really does it. The simple fact that what we're presented with is REAL.

Of course since then I've discovered that the book goes on far beyond what I saw in my childhood. 10 volumes total, depicting the aftermath of the bomb and the surrender on the lives of people.

It's a major strength of the work that it doesn't flinch from it's criticizing of both the Americans who dropped the bomb, but also the Japanese powers who started the war. The first volume gives you a disturbing taste of what it was like in Japan during the war. A place of fanatical nationalism and conformity gone mad. This I feel is very important in any work dealing with this period. The use of nuclear weapons granted Japan as a nation a certain sense of victimhood, but it's easy for that to overshadow the crimes Japan commited in the war. Including crimes against it's own people.

So, the story continues on, in it's strangely compelling way. Ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances is perhaps a phrase that you could use, cliched as it is. Gen, his family and friends struggle to survive, despite all the suffering and misfortune that is thrown in their way. And unrelenting suffering is quite a running theme. As much as you want for the fated happily ever after the characters so obviously deserve to appear it never does. But they go on, trying hard and doing their best. Because it's basically that or die.

Inspiring and horrifying in equal measure, this is really an epic story of the true costs of war, and of it's victims.

More people should read this, especially nowadays.