This manga is about remembering -
05/15/2007
by Vanessa Raney
I here offer an excerpt of the review I posted to the Comics Discussion Board (http://www.comicartscholar.com/viewtopic.php?t=254):
"I think I decided to go ahead and do this project because this whole time, somewhere deep inside, I've been feeling that it is unnatural and irresponsible to remain disconnected from this issue--or rather, that it is unnatural and irresponsible for me to consciously try to avoid this issue. Although I was born and raised in Hiroshima, I am neither a hibakusha survivor of the atomic bomb, nor am I a second generation hibakusha." - Fumyo Kouno, from the "Afterward"
The two-page spread that opens Kouno's three-part manga shows colorful watercolor washes. On the right page, a girl in a green and white dress holds an instrument on her lap as she sits atop a sculptural object, her bare feet dangling. The footnote to "Yûnagi," on the bottom left page, explains that it "is a term for a windless calm that settles in during the evening after sea breezes die down and before inland winds begin to blow." This offers a foreboding against the tranquility of what the reader will discover to be a partial cityscape of Hiroshima. The reader will likewise find out that the woman is Minami Hirano, and the dress a symbol of her unfulfilled desires.
Toward the end of the story, in the third section ("Cherry Blossoms 2/Sakura no Kuni Part 1"), Minami's brother Asahi Ishikawa shares with his daughter Nanami the significance of Minami's death: "This year is the fiftieth anniversary of the death of my longest surviving sister" (1:98 ). Kouno, however, throws off the reader in the second section ("Cherry Blossoms 1/Sakura no Kuni Part 1") when she breaks from the previous storyline to focus on Nanami and her girlhood friend Toko Tone.
Nanami's facial expression on the title page for section two recalls the one of Minami in the opening. However, Nanami also appears like a tree nymph with cherry blossoms pinned to her hair, her right foot up on a branch with her other foot on the tree's base, and her plain collarless shoulderless dress. The environment of the cherry blossom tree similarly contrasts against the twilight of a starful sky in the previous.
More significantly, however, Kouno's manga addresses the question: What happens when there's no one left to bear witness to Hiroshima (and Nagasaki)? Often, when people relate this question to the Holocaust, it is assumed that (1) only the dead can bear witness, (2) only those who experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand can bear witness, or (3) only generations brought up under the umbrella of the Holocaust can bear witness. There is, however, scholarship that addresses the role and impact of witnessing from outsiders.
Kouno - as other contemporary Holocaust/genocide/etc. artists - shows that witnessing does not require the lived experience of horror, but the desire to face our pasts. For Japan, the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are more real than to us outside of Japan (except for the foreigners who were in Japan during the bombings and/or their aftermaths) - because we don't know what it is to still be dying even years after an event, with the exception of those who faced Agent Orange and other chemical wars.
Kuono reminds us that death is omnipresent with the experiences of joy. Many Japanese, too, have had to relive the pain of the bombings as they (re)witness(ed) the deaths of loved ones because of atomic illnesses resulting from the massive amounts of radiation unleashed during the bombings. It is time that we, like Minami, confront our pasts.
This manga is about remembering - so buy it and share your thoughts! After all, it is important that we, too, carry the burden of witnessing. More importantly, we cannot deny our roles in the continuing suffering of people affected by our wars.
:)
