Barefoot Gen Volume 2: The Day After


By Keiji Nakazawa (Last Gasp)
ISBN: 978-0-86719-619-1

The second volume of Keiji Nakazawa’s astounding anti war masterpiece finds six year old Gen Nakaoka with his mother and newborn sister in the streets of devastated Hiroshima, traumatised witnesses to a parade of unique horrors and madness as the walking dead of the city stagger past, looking for aid or surcease – or perhaps for nothing at all.

Nakazawa, like Gen, does not only blame the Americans for the monstrous tragedy. In dry, bulletin-like manner the author blends the facts of the event into his passionate drama, and shows that the Japanese Military suppressed the news of the Atomic Bomb, fearing a panic or popular revolt, and allowing – perhaps even forcing (although that’s a pretty hard-sell for me) the Americans to do the same thing to Nagasaki three days later.

What I hadn’t previously known was that on that same day Russia ended its neutrality agreement with the Empire and attacked the Japanese Kwantung Army in a Soviet invasion of Manchuria: the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation. Only then did the war leaders stop throwing away their peoples’ lives…

Gen and his mother make for the suburbs driven by revulsion and hunger. Severely malnourished for months, she has no milk to suckle her baby with, and the boy leaves her to scavenge for food, but comes upon a military clean-up squad literally stacking bodies, making no distinction between dead and nearly so…

He finds children and an old woman brutalising a dead American POW. Many prisoners and slave races like the Korean Mr. Pak (a friend and fellow Pariah, as despised as the anti-war Nakaoka “traitors” had been) were used for forced labour in the industrial heart of Hiroshima – a fact the Americans must have known…

Overcome with hunger and exhaustion Gen collapses, and ends up on a pyre with a pile of corpses. He is saved by one of the funeral squad – a decent soldier who tries to carry him home only to collapse from hideous, mysterious ailments – Gen’s first experience of the invisible destroyer Radiation Sickness. Soon he realises that he hasn’t escaped the unseen terror either as his hair falls out in knotted clumps. Nakazawa is a master of emotional placement – we readers know what is happening but to the survivors in 1945 this was a completely new experience – a ghost disease that struck without warning, affecting everybody in a different manner, and with his open, stylized drawing he makes us feel the bewilderment and terror.

Lurching from one encounter to the next Gen is an innocent cataloguing the many horrors of the bomb, but always he tries to encourage the people who had reviled him mere days ago. However when he stops the disfigured little girl Natsue from committing suicide, he finds a greater purpose and begins his lifelong campaign to defeat the evil of warfare with a positive attitude and bold action.

Throughout the epic, folk songs are used as a narrative device, and when Gen’s performance at a suburban house earns enough rice to stave off death a while longer it leads to a startling encounter with a pack of child thieves, one of whom is the exact double of dead brother Shinji. Called Ryuta, the boy’s tale of woe is as bad as all the rest but it does lead to a reunion with the Mr. Pak and a realisation: Gen must find and honour the remains of his family…

With all their obligations fulfilled the remaining Nakaoka’s head for the rural district of Eba and temporary refuge with Mother’s oldest friend. But the reception would prove to be anything but hospitable…

August 6th 1945 changed the world forever and deeply affected six-year-old Keiji Nakazawa. When the “Little Boy” thermonuclear weapon was thrown from the American B-29 bomber “Enola Gay” onto the city of Hiroshima, he was only one kilometre from Ground Zero, just entering Kanzaki Primary School. He was saved from instant vaporisation in the same manner as his comics alter-ego Gen Nakaoka, and over the years he has suffered many of the same hardships, tragedies and triumphs. Hopefully Barefoot Gen, the evocative anti-war weapon he created, will always stand ready to counteract the periodic madness that arouses the greedy and afflicts the vain and the foolish.

© 2008 Keiji Nakazawa. All Rights Reserved.