Selected Book
Barefoot Gen Volume Five: The Never-Ending War (Paperback)
- Paperback
- Author: Keiji Nakazawa
- Publisher: Last Gasp
- Release Date: February 2008
- ISBN-10: 0867195967
- ISBN-13: 9780867195965
- List Price: $14.95
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Summaries and Customer Reviews provided by Amazon
SummaryFor the first time in the English language, the story of Gen's life after the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima is continued. In postwar Japan, the people of Hiroshima face a massive food shortage and horrendous health problems. Gen is forced to choose between staying in school and making money to support his family and ailing mother. |
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Basic, but powerful
Rating:
This manga is unsophisticated in its artwork, storytelling, and politics. Yet that very lack of sophistication seems to me to be what gives it power that probably could only otherwise be generated by poetry, or perhaps opera.
You might as well go ahead and buy the four volumes in this series now, to save time & postage. Then you can wait, like I am waiting, in the hope that Project Gen manages to publish the next six volumes in the series.
Note: there is at least one prior English edition of Barefoot Gen, and the volume contents are not the same as in the latest edition. So if, for example, you buy volume 3 of the earlier edition (1979), you will find that it overlaps the latter part of volume 2 of the current edition (issued in 2004.) The volume titles seem to be the same in each edition, so things can get confusing if you don't stick with the same edition. If you buy used, pay attention to which edition you are getting.
According to Wikipedia, these are the published & projected volumes in the current English translation series of Barefoot Gen:
* Barefoot Gen #1: A Cartoon Story Of Hiroshima (ISBN 0-86719-602-5)
* Barefoot Gen #2: The Day After (ISBN 0-86719-619-X)
* Barefoot Gen #3: Life After The Bomb (ISBN 0-86719-594-0)
* Barefoot Gen #4: Out Of The Ashes (ISBN 0-86719-595-9)
* Barefoot Gen #5: The Never-Ending War (17 April 2008, ISBN-10: 0867195967)
* Barefoot Gen #6: Writing the Truth (17 April 2008, ISBN-10: 0867195975)
* Barefoot Gen #7: (Not published in English)
* Barefoot Gen #8: (Not published in English)
* Barefoot Gen #9: (Not published in English)
* Barefoot Gen #10: (Not published in English)
As a Japanese reader...
Rating:
Barefoot Gen - I grew up with this famous comic series by Nakazawa. It's about a boy called 'Gen' and his life in Hiroshima during the WWII and soon after the atomic bomb. Volumes 1 & 2 are probably the most important ones. After I read them in English, I just had to lend them to everyone I knew. If you read this story, you'll realise how silly to hear some popular opiniton 'Dropping two atomic bombs in Japan was necessary to end the war'. The author Nakazawa says that each and every event illustrated here is a true story. You'll see, for example, that two young brothers fight against each other for a little grain of rice. Gen trying to encourage a girl who used to be dreaming about one day becoming a professional dancer, but now her face was badly burnt by the bomb, although she still didn't know it - he refuses to let her see the mirror.
The bombs were dropped onto civilians in the two cities, and, in Hiroshima alone, 100,000 people, including children, elderly people and western prisoners of war, were killed instantly, and the pain they suffered from it was tremendous. The way some of Gen's family members, including a new born baby sister, were slowly dying is simply too sad to look at. But the reality is that it actually took place and was caused by human hands.
I sincerely hope that many people will find the opportunity to read this book at least once in their life-time, and I strongly believe that this book will enlighten the whole world with the message: 'What really happens when a nuclear bomb is dropped onto humanity', which hasn't really been talked about in history books for some reason. But I think it's time to face reality.
WE MUST READ THIS BOOK AS WE WONDER WHY OUR WAR DOES NOT ESTABLISH PEACE
Rating:
In our present time this portal to the topic of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and our nature as the only nation to build and to use nuclear weapons, and against strictly civilian population centers may inform our moral consideration of the present failure of our total war alone against civilians to establish a peaceful and stable and democratic society.
This present volume serves as an excellent introduction to the topic. Centering on Hiroshima, as may supplement this strong introductory reading with the recent study by Prof. Takaki, or the new Racing the Enemy, which explores the lack of military reason for dropping the Bomb against an already defeated Japanese Empire. We may also read on this specific event of crisis the moving Letters from the End of the World, or HIroshima Diary, written as was Gen by eyewitnesses and civilian victims of this our nuclear holocaust. Hershey is also important to read of course, and the reissue of Hiroshima Mon Amour, but I keep returning to this child's eye view in Barefoot Gen.
We are fortunate in this reprinting for the informed and astute introduction by Art Spiegelman, the creator of the Maus series which does a similar though more symbolic treatment of the Nazi Holocaust. Art strongly recomends this first person account of a small boy on the morning of the Bomb, and its immediate effects upon himself and upon his family. Please read this book and remember. Our Popes continue to visit the Peace Park at Ground Zero in Hiroshima, to pray for peace and nonviolence and for the development of peoples.
Easy way to get a sense of a historical event.
Rating:
The manga form of presentation makes reading about the prelude to this event easy and fast. The book seemed to be reasonably accurate with historical documentation and the visual format allowed the author to include detail that might otherwise have become difficult to work into the story. The clothing, clogs, air raid hoods, etc. that are be depicted add depth of information to a quick read.
Powerful, though stilted at times
Rating: 
Keiji Nakazawa, Barefoot Gen (New Society Publishing, 1983)
Keiji Nakazawa's four-volume graphic epic Barefoot Gen has become legendary in the field of graphic literature, and also, in no small way, out of it. While many Japanese artists working in every medium have examined the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and their aftereffects, Nakazawa, who lived in Hiroshima at the time the bombs were dropped, has an understandably closer perspective than most others who have tried it. For sheer power, Barefoot Gen's only rival in the subgenre is the similarly legendary Grave of the Fireflies.
This eponymous first volume takes us through the life of Gen, an elementary school student, and his family in the months before the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. Gen's father, while not a pacifist, is notorious in town for his speaking out against the war, which gets him and his family branded traitors. Because of this, they don't have an easy life. The family members try to find various ways to survive in the face of shunning at best, and aggression at worst, from the rest of the townspeople.
Do you need to be told that this is a book that's going to hit you in the face like a sledgehammer with its message? The artistry, or lack of same, in the delivery is the place where Grave of the Fireflies is clearly superior to Barefoot Gen, but while Nakazawa is not above letting his message get in the way of his story on occasion, it never happens for too long a period of time. Nakazawa's characters are well-drawn, and the story spends more time focused on its characters than on its message. There is a lot to be liked here, and a good deal to be mulled over, as well. Well worth your time. ****
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