Why is this melodrama bad? You didn’t seem to mind the melodrama in Dousei Jidai, I recall. Avalanche of Love and all.

One’s romance, one’s war, both sin against reality. I expect Gen’s truer to life. Does its idiom offend? I’m interested in melodrama generally, and when and why it ceases to be accepted, so I’d like to know what you think there.

That asked, you’re right that Gen’s a deeply melodramatic kids’ book. It’s also a push against a few decades of native propaganda hyping Japan as the East’s superior savior (see Kramers’ #6 for Nakakuro, a visually stunning, politically odious sample). Koreans are still discriminated against and the Right’s still clinging to power fantasies that many Americans, even with our odious partisanship, would find astonishing. Gen started in ’73 so I read it as a young radical lashing out at the previous generation’s crap. It ran in a mainstream magazine, but at a time when the whole mainstream was pretty crazy, experimental, and passionate– it ran with Dr. Toilet and Samurai Giants, for instance. I wonder too how the gore in Gen looks next to the other comics in Shonen Jump. Nakazawa’s always struck me as deeply humanist, like Kurosawa, but K’s most deeply moral work appeared when N was still a kid. That said, what’s remarkable to me about the book is how, as a kids’ work that uses caricature, it doesn’t whitewash. Compare the execrable 1983 film adaptation, or sentimental works by non-hibakusha. I’ll stop before I go off on hibakusha lit, Holocaust lit, and genre.

Anyway, when I win a ton of money betting on the NCAAs, I’m getting us tickets for the museum in Hiroshima. It has both nigh-sacred artifacts from the blast and kitschy wax-dummy bomb victims that offend American sensibilities. There’s also a great pub there where someone threw a live octopus at my prissy ex-girlfriend, and if we go before June 11 we’ll see “The Special Exhibition: War through the Eyes of Children With the Help of Barefoot Gen.” See, it’s kismet.

If you want things to be changed, then the government has to take initiative themselves by taking a look at the leaders in charge. Just letting them know about problems isn’t enough.

I realize this isn’t supposed to be a pleasurable read or anything, and I certainly haven’t experienced anything remotely near what these characters are going through. Maybe this level of people being crappy to each other really is true-to-life.

But some parts of it do read as over-the-top to me and when that happens, I start to disengage.

I just against the melodrama.

As far as Maus… I haven’t read it in, probably 10 years or more, so I’m not in a place to comment.

Another point, brutal honesty and straight-forward portrayal do not necessarily make good narrative. In fact I would in general argue the opposite.

Gen is a survivor’s memoir and the injustice depicted is the book’s greatest strength, not a weakness. It’s what gives it its emotional resonance and social relevance. This “injustice” is exactly what Nakazawa wanted to convey (and I think he did it quite successfully) to hopefully enlighten people to the horrors of nuclear weapons. This is not meant to be a feel-good, human interest story; it’s a harsh recounting of the greatest atrocity in human civilization.

I tried to make the case at my blog that Nakazawa was being truthful in the vast majority of what is presented. Sure, there were a few embellishments for artistic license (which is always true in autobiography) and maybe they were exaggerated too much in some cases, but overall it’s a brutally honest and straight-forward portrayal.

I can understand if the book makes people uncomfortable or depressed, but to complain about this as a foundational weakness of the work itself seems both cold-hearted and indefensible to me. Would you level the same criticism at Speigelman’s Maus?

As I commented on David Welsh’s post, what really gets to me is unrelenting, over-the-top injustice, and it seems that’s what I’ve got to look forward to in volumes to come.