CBR Live! Archive
Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms Review
- by MarkAndrew
- in Comic Reviews, General
As you can probably tell by the cover here Fumiyo Kouno's Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms sprightly drawn shojo (girls) style manga about love, loss, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the lingering horrors of radiation sickness, and the subtle physical and mental wounds that span generations.
Or maybe you can't tell by the cover.
Danielle Leigh covered this book a while back in capsule form, but I had more to say.
Therefore all of us, here, now.
Also Leiden edited, leading to many comments like "Mr. Caps Lock is not your friend." Thanks, Leiden!
Technically, this 100 page volume contains two stories: Town of Evening Calm and Country of Cherry Blossoms but since they're connected through theme, characters, even setting, I found it easier to view 'em as two parts of a whole.
In order: Town of Evening Calm takes place ten years after the Hiroshima bombing. Our heroine is a teenage girl name Minami, who lives in the somewhat-rebuilt center of Hiroshima. And while Town of Evening Calm doesn't shy away from showing us Minamini's hard life - She sleeps in a one-room shack, next to her grandmother, she decides to walk barefoot to protect her shoes(!), and certainly can't afford a store-bought dress. Minami's certainly living in a tough environment, but the narrative isn't primarily concerned with survivor mentality - It's about the day to day acts of living, with THE BOMB a quiet, subtle shadow in the background. It's neither a happy story nor a downright horrible one either - Barring one scene where two lover's innocent embrace is portrayed against piles of faceless ghost-corpses in the backdrop, symbolizing both the epic struggle between life and death and the fairly subdued, introverted story about loving and losing that are the two major themes of the book.
Country of Cherry Blossoms, the second story, is even quieter, possibly because it's set even further from the tragedy. The rather ethereal plot concerns the evolving friendship between Nanimi Ishakawa, and her friend Tojo, and Nanimi's attempts to find out why her father is sneaking off into the city at night. We also meet Minami;s Brother Ashasi, who was mentioned in Town of Evening Calm as being sent to live with family. This is an even bigger story, covering well over a decade of time, but, like Town of Evening Calm, the plot is fairly skeletal: A girl hangs out with her friends sometimes, follows her father into town sometimes, thinks about falling in love sometimes, and this minimal action leaves us to infer the larger struggles occuring in the background.
I'm not an especially experienced Manga reader, but I can definitely see how this book is playing against type. It ain't Death Note. Topically, it covers some of the same ground as Nakazawa's epic Barefoot Gen. But where Barefoot Gen viscerally demonstrated the horrors of the atomic bomb, ToECCoCB only alludes. We know this terrible thing happened, and we see the damage still occurring years later. Also, while Barefoot Gen was plot driven, Town of Evening Clam is powered by an interesting dichotomy: It's writing about characters, and drawing about place.
However, when taken together, the two stories avoid pushing the explosions, the break-ups, the big events, and instead communicate the ebb and flow of history through character pieces, only quietly alluding to the bombing and other big events. Even when we're shown the death of a major character, we never see the body of her family's hysterics. There's one panel showing a few drops of blood, and then a sequence of pure white, showing nothing. And then the camers zooms back for a few last glances of Central Hiroshima, and we see a paper blowing in the wind, rising towards the sky. And Cut.
End Scene.
Maybe the most interesting and effective storytelling element here is Kouno's "characterization" of the city itself. As with the panels above, the camera ducks and waves, showing us both the characters and the city itself from a variety of angles, moving from extreme close-ups - Just a face - to lush, panoramic, cityscapes.
Rarely, we might catch a quick glimpse of a ruined building, but Hiroshima is usually teaming with life. Busses, run, neighbors greet each other in the street, dogs frolic, cherry blossoms grow. Kouno's people live in a fully realized world...
Which falls apart a little bit when we look past the scenery and concentrate on the nuts-and-bolts cartooning.
On the one hand, the cheerful cartoonishness that deliniates the happy-go-lucky lookin' little moppets provide a thematic contrast to the STORY about THE BOMB. On the other the figure drawing is so locked into Kouno's singular style that it fails to reinforce the interplay of multiple themes and moods that the story tries to conjure. In fact, in some places it actively hindered my following of the plot. I didn't notice, for instance, when the main characters aged 18 years between the first and second chapters, as they basically retained the same undefined, demeanor. There's a strange discepancy here. The art seems to be almost completely consumed with establishing place, the writing is all about defining character, and the two never really gel together into a seamless comic narrative.
Back to the writing: It's solidly paced and confident, allowing the reader to interact on his or her own level with the heavy shit being laid down, and not stooping to simplistic demonization... It shows the prejudice Japanese people demonstrated towards Hiroshima survivors, but it also shows the somewhat logical reasons FOR this prejudice - The survivors did tend to drop dead of radiation poisoning, and who the hell knows if it was catching? There are a handful of translation flubs where the dialog is non-naturalistic, or sometimes downright clunky, but the surety and graceful subtlety of the pacing and characterization greatly outweigh these couple hiccups.
It is a pretty damn good book, even if it doesn't quite seem like Fumiyo Kouno has hit her stride as a cartoonist, especially in terms of integrating art and text, and the art isn't quite up to the task of presenting the dark-night-of-the-soul-oh-shit-everbody-died themes of the book. Still, the strengths outweight the weaknesses, here, and this feels like an important, maybe even a necessary comic - The only way for old wounds to heal is to expose them to the light.
- Posted on April 20, 2008 @ 11:00 PM
- Leave a Comment
- Share This!
8 Comments
MarkAndrew
April 20, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Editorial somewhat disagrees with my conclusion, or at least my conclusion from a draft ago. (Hopefully I explained myself better since) - Also note I had plenty of room to make new mistakes when I'm actually typing the post in. So if I screw up since it's me, not her:
Danielle Leigh
April 21, 2008 at 4:20 am
Lovely review, MarkAndrew. I can't remember if I convinced you to buy this or not (but if I did, I'm glad, because you covered a difficult but important comic much better than I could).
Dan Felty
April 21, 2008 at 10:03 am
I'll be checking this out thanks to the coverage by the two of you. I'm reading Barefoot Gen now, and it is really affecting.
Does Kuono have any direct personal experience with the bombing, as did Nakazawa?
By the way, this manga was adapted into a live-action movie in 2007. Is that common?
MarkAndrew
April 21, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Danielle - Yeah. Bought it completely on your say-so. And thanks - Although false modesty is unbecoming.
Dan Felty - Kuono wasn't there for the bombing or anything - She's quite a bit too young. But she is a Hiroshima native, and it was part of her life, in a way. There's a nice essay on the genesis of the book in her introduction.
And, gah, I didn't even know there was a movie. I'd never heard of a live-action manga before ... But I am SO not the Japanese culture guy. Hopefully Danielle will come back and field this.
wwk5d
April 22, 2008 at 5:50 am
"I’m not an especially experienced Manga reader, but I can definitely see how this book is playing against type. It ain’t Death Note."
Actually, with Manga, there is no one 'type', it's just a stereotype Westerners have about Manga and Anime being all blood & violence & tits & ass. If anything, Manga on the whole is much more rich and diverse than Western comics. There are so many types and genres, you can't exactly compare this title with Tenchi Muyo! or Maison Ikkoku or Escaflowne or Pokemon or Witch Hunter Robin, just to name a few examples. Hell, in Japan, they had an manga series about Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Nissan-Renault. I don't see them ever making a comic book series about Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch (unless it's a thinly veiled villain character in someone else's book). Hope more people realize this...
Dan Felty
April 22, 2008 at 11:16 am
It really is tough to get over my preconceptions of manga. My perspective seems much like that of someone who doesn't read US comics and thinks they're all superheroes fighting. I equated the very little anime I'd seen to all manga, and thought it was all about guys staring each other down and talking about their spiritual power. I knew that wasn't it, but it was easy to go along with that notion. I'm working to remedy that.
TOWN OF EVENING CALM, COUNTRY OF CHERRY BLOSSOMS IS THE WINNER « Limitless Cinema in Broken English
June 17, 2009 at 7:28 am
[...] You can read a review of this comic book here: http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2008/04/20/town-of-evening-calm-country-of-cherry-blossoms-... [...]
M.N
August 4, 2009 at 4:57 am
Following is an excerpt from a book about Hiroshima and Nagasaki written by an American historian.
--THE DECISION TO USE THE ATOMIC BOMB. by Prof.Gar Alperovitz
----------------------------------------------------------------
Among the many remaining puzzles surrounding the
decision to use the atomic bomb, perhaps the most
intriguing concern two of the nation's highest World
War II military leaders. A few years after Hiroshima
and Nagasaki were destroyed, Admiral William D. Leahy
went public with the following statement.
? It is my opinion that the use of the barbarous
? weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material
? assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese
? were already defeated and ready to surrender.....
? My own feeling was that in being the first to
? use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common
? to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not
? taught to make war in that fashion, and wars
? cannot be won by destroying women and children.
Leahy was not what one might call a typical critic
of American policy. Not only had the five-star admiral
presided over the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff(and the
Combined American-British Chiefs of Staff), but he
had simultaneously been chief of staff to the commander-in-chief of
the army and navy, serving Roosevelt in that
capacity from 1942 to 1945 and Truman from 1945 to 1949.
Moreover, he was a good friend of Truman's and the two
men respected and liked each other; his public criticism
of the Hiroshima decision was hardly personal.
We can imagine what it would mean today if General
Colin Powell were to go public with a similar critique,
say, of the massive bombing he presided over as
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of the Staff during the
1991 Persian Gulf War--and on decisions made by his
friend President George Bush.
A similar puzzle concerns Dwight D.Eisenhower, the
triumphant Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary
Force who directed British and American operations
against Hitler--and also, subsequently, of course,
president of the United States. In the midst of the
Cold War--shortly after his famous Farewell Address
criticizing the "military-industrial complex"--
Eisenhower also went public with a statement about the
Hiroshima decision.
Recalling the 1945 moment when Secretary of War Henry
L.Stimson informed him the atomic bomb would be used
against Japanese cities, Eisenhower stated:
? During his recitation of the relevant facts,
? I had been conscious of a feeling of depression
? and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings,
? first on the basis of my belief that Japan was
? already defeated and that dropping the bomb was
? completely unnecessary, and secondly because I
? thought that our country should avoid shocking
? world opinion by the use of a weapon whose
? employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory
? as a measure to save American lives. It was my
? belief that Japan was, at that very moment,
? seeking some way to surrender with a minimum
? loss of "face".?????
Something clearly had caused Leahy and Eisenhower to
break the unwritten rule that requires high officials
to maintain a discreet silence in connection with
controversial matters about which they have special
knowledge. But as we shall see, Leahy and Eisenhower
were not the only military figures who broke the rule.
Moreover, less than a year after the bombings an
extensive official study by the U.S. Strategic Bombing
Survey published its conclusion that Japan would
likely have surrendered in 1945 without atomic bombing,
without a Soviet declaration of war, and without an
American invasion.
Again, it is not only the substance of the conclusion
reached by this official body, but the fact that it
was made public and received wide publicity, which
forces itself into awareness, now, nearly fifty years
after the fact.
GAR ALPEROVITZ: THE DECISION TO USE THE ATOMIC BOMB
(VINTAGE BOOKS A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, 1995)pp.3-4
------------------------------------------------------------------
Do you think the two atomic bombs were used to conclude the war?