While recovering from a nasty cold that derailed my plans for a 3 day weekend (hence, no posts of late), Liz sent a Care package of anime and manga. Goodies included the Gall Force OVAs, the first Air DVD, the next DVDs of Full Metal Alchemist, and some other manga. In my groggy state I managed to read Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, and see the first three episodes of Red Garden. Town of Evening Calm is a pair of sweet, painful stories of people affected, directly and indirectly, by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Brief, but incredibly poignant, the stories are jewels of emotion and compassion. Unlike the more famous Barefoot Gen, the one volume work by Fumiyo Kono takes place years after the blast. But the effects, physical and psychological, linger on.
At heart, the Japanese aesthetic is poetic, in the sense that a work of art is often crystallized into a spare, deceptively simple frame of astonishing power and meaning. The art work here is clean and pure of line, yet captures the details of life with astonishing clarity. The dialogue seems almost mundane, yet sparkles with life and depth. So much compressed into two little stories! It would take a novel hundreds of pages to clumsily do as much.
An amazing, beautiful manga that you should read. Kudos to Last Gasp Press for bringing this award winner to America. http://www.lastgasp.com/
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