Barefoot Gen Vol.1: No. 1: A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima Book

While graphic novels are now very much a part of the mainstream literary environment, manga has remained something of a niche genre most popular with Japanese businessmen and Anglo emo-teens, but there are several series which really do deserve to have a wider audience. Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen is one such series. Literary and yet still accessible in the same way as Art Spiegelman's phenomenal Maus, Barefoot Gen is loosely based on Nakazawa's own experiences as a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing.

Nakazawa was six years old when an atomic bomb with power equal to 13500 tons of TNT was detonated 1850 feet above the centre of Hiroshima at 08:16 on the morning of August 6 1945. Roughly 400000 people were living in the Hiroshima area at the time. Roughly 232000 of them died, either as a direct result of the explosion or later through radiation poisoning. Nakazawa was about a mile from the city centre when the bomb was detonated and he survived by pure luck.

Barefoot Gen begins in April 1945 and this first volume follows young Gen and his family, along with millions of other Japanese civilians, as they struggle to deal with the hardships that plagued the country in the run up to the end of World War Two. In the four months prior to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Gen and his family are be shunned and abused by their neighbours due to his father's pacifist beliefs. The cruelties and hardships of their daily lives are seen through the eyes of Gen as he struggles to understand why his family are despised. The loving, tight-knit family is viewed in sharp contrast with the rabid militaristic, patriotic stance of the nation as a whole. There is a very authentic feel to the way daily life in Japan at the tail-end of a war which brought pain and famine to a proud nation is portrayed. This volume ends with the events of August 6, the day of the atomic bomb.

A beautiful though harrowing work, Barefoot Gen is a testimony to the horrors of nuclear war and to the triumph of the human spirit. This is an amazingly power series that I would recommend to anyone interested in history and, indeed, humanity.