Barefoot Gen

Barefoot Gen by Nakazawa Keiji, translated by staff of Project Gen (1987) Published by New Society Publishers, 285 pages.

I like this book because it’s strange in so many ways. It’s a Japanese comic book that was written in the 1970s and translated at the end of the 1980s into various languages by a group of academics and antinuclear activists who saw in this story of a family living in Hiroshima at the end of World War II. The Japan of this autobiographical story has become exceedingly militant—Japanese civilians have been so entrained to believe American soldiers are marauding devils that they commit suicide en mass in Okinawa rather than face surrender; military cadets who can’t handle basic training are hounded to the point of committing suicide—and yet one father, a humble farmer and artisan, is convinced that the war is a stupid idea, and is not afraid to say so publicly, even though it means that his whole family—including the two youngest boys, Gen and Shinji—will be ostracized.
Even for someone well versed in both Western and Japanese comic books, the conventions of this story are unsettling and a little creepy. Any time the characters are upset, huge rivulets of tears stream from their eyes. When Gen and Shinji are happy they do the same weird dance. And whenever anyone is angry, they start slapping and punching each other. Parents punch children, children punch their teachers, the leaders of a work camp sticks at the children they look after. In the first part of the book, young Gen bites off part of the finger of a young boy who antagonizes him. For a book so prized by pacifists, this is immensely violent. Even the most heartwarming parts of the book (such as the story of Gen saving a poor glass merchant who can’t pay his debts) are punctuated by acts of sadism and brutality.
This story is filled with shadows cast by the light of the atomic bomb that’s dropped at the end of the book. It’s a story of childhood memories that can never be clearly recovered because they’ll always be seen through the filter of a mushroom cloud. Even the illustration style in which Nakazawa renders city scenes, wheat fields, train engines and bombing raids gives you a sense of unnaturally acute lighting, a world being recreated in painstaking detail only with the knowledge that at the end all of it will be ripped apart. The early scenes of flowing tears are weirdly conjured up again at the end of the story when we see the horrifying images of Hiroshima’s citizens wandering about zombie-like with the flesh melting from their faces. I’m not sure that any of this was intentional on the author’s part, but perhaps intention doesn’t matter that much, as he’s told a story about people in situations so extreme as to challenge even the strongest of human wills.