Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms

AUTHOR: Kouno, Fumiyo

ARTIST: Fumiyo Kouno (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Futabasha (Japanese); Last Gasp (English)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION:Yunagi no machi, 2003; Sakura no kuni, 2004

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION:Yunagi no machi, Sakura no kuni, 2004 (English translation, 2007)

Publication History

In the summer of 2003, Kouno was a rising manga artist, and her editor at Futabasha’s Weekly Manga Action magazine suggested that she write a manga about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II. The September 30, 2003, issue of Weekly Manga Action featured Yunagi no machi (Town of evening calm), the first story of her project. In July, 2004, the two stories of Sakura no kuni (Country of cherry blossoms) were published.

Based on the success of the three stories, Futabasha published them in a single volume (tankobon), Yunagi no machi, sakura no kuni, inOctober, 2004. In 2007, Last Gasp, a small American press specializing in unusual and underground comics, published the first English edition as Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. Naoko Amemiya and Andy Nakatani supplied the translation. A second American printing came out in November, 2007, as the first printing sold quickly. In Japan, a bunkoban edition was published in 2008. In the United States, Last Gasp published a hardcover edition in 2009.

Plot

At first glance, Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms appeared an unusual choice for the Weekly Manga Action. Born in Hiroshima, but not a descendant of atomic-bomb survivors, Kouno approached her Hiroshima manga with some reluctance. Its tender story of three generations of survivors of the atomic blast over Hiroshima seemed oddly placed in a manga magazine that features covers of bikini- or underwear-clad young women; Weekly Manga Action is primarily marketed as a seinen manga, sold to mostly male readers between eighteen and thirty years old. But during this time, Kouno’s manga series Nagai Michi (Long Road, 2001-2004), about the experiences of a young married couple, was running in the magazine.

“Town of Evening Calm” begins in Hiroshima in the summer of 1955. Minami Hirano is a young office worker who helps her female coworker Furuta sew a copy of a pretty summer dress that they spotted in a shop window. When Furuta asks their male coworker Uchikoshi if the dress would suit Minami too, it causes both him and Minami some embarrassment. On her way home, Minami takes off her dress shoes to save them from wear as she walks to the post-World War II makeshift hut where she lives with her mother, Fujimi.

Later, Uchikoshi visits Minami, who had missed work because she had to take her mother to the hospital. When Uchikoshi suggests Minami would make a good wife someday, Minami chases him away. That evening, in the women’s communal bath house, Minami looks sadly at the radiation burns covering her arms.

Minami goes home with Uchikoshi one week later, and their first kiss triggers Minami’s flashback to the day the atomic bomb fell. She runs from Uchikoshi and relives that day and its immediate aftermath. Back at work, she and Uchikoshi make up, but Minami falls ill with fatigue. As Minami dies from the long-term effects of radiation sickness, she wonders if her death makes happy the people who dropped the bomb.

Part 1 of “Country of Cherry Blossoms” opens in the spring of 1987. Tomboy Nanami Ishikawa has just entered fifth grade in Tokyo. Nanami’s mother Kyotohas died, and she lives with her younger brother Nagio, her father Asahi (the brother of the late Minami), and her grandmother Fujimi. A latchkey child, Nanami is a passionate baseball player. She is hurt during practice, so both she and her friend Toko go to the hospital, where her grandmother Fujimi and brother Nagio have been receiving treatment.

In the hospital, the personnel welcome Nagio, who is being treated for asthma, and drop cherry blossoms on his bed because he cannot go outside for them. Scolded by her grandmother for disturbing Nagio, Nanami is taken home. That summer, Fujimi dies from her radiation poisoning.

Part 2 begins in the summer of 2004. The retired Asahi worries his two children, who are in their twenties. They fear that he has become senile. When Asahi leaves suddenly, Nanami follows him. At a bus station, Nanami is greeted by Toko, whom she has not seen for seventeen years. They trail Asahi to Hiroshima.

While Toko visits the Peace Memorial Park, Nanami follows Asahi. Her father visits old friends and prays at his family grave. As Asahi sits by the riverbank, the story flashes back to the years after Minami’s death, when Asahi returned to Hiroshima. He falls in love with young Kyoko Ota, an atomic-bomb survivor who helps Asahi’s mother with her sewing business. Nanami then remembers the sudden death of Kyoko, her mother, when she was young.

In the present, Nanami arranges for Nagio to meet them in Tokyo, furthering the nascent romance of Nagio and Toko. On the train home, father and daughter have a heart-to-heart talk. Asahi insists that he is sane, and that his daughter reminds him of his late sister Minami.

Characters

• Minami Hirano, the protagonist, is a pretty, cheerful twenty-three-year-old Japanese woman whose arms still bear radiation marks from the Hiroshima atomic-bomb blast. She initially denies a tender romance with a male coworker out of guilt for having survived the blast when so many died. Her unexpected death signals both criticism of the war and a new beginning.

• Furuta, Minami’s pretty coworker, is identified with a white barrette in her black hair, and involuntarily initiates Minami’s tender romance. Forty-nine years later, she is visited by Asahi on his remembrance trip to Hiroshima, helping to bring closure to the narrative.

• Uchikoshi is Minami’s shy male coworker and romantic interest. When Asahi meets him in 2004, he has turned just as bald as Minami jokingly foretold.

• Fujimi Hirano is Minami’s mother. Her face is wrinkled from early aging and grief over losing her husband and, eventually, her three daughters as a result of the Hiroshima bombing.

• Nanami Ishikawa, the tomboy niece of Minami, wears her hair short like a boy and dresses in a baseball uniform at eleven. At eighteen, she is an office worker with longer hair, but she still has an independent attitude. She trails her father to Hiroshima and learns more about her family history.

• Toko Tone is the light-haired, feminine-attired teenage classmate of Nanami in 1987. Seventeen years later, she has become a nurse and is the possible love interest of Nanami’s brother Nagio.

• Asahi Ishikawa, Minami’s brother and Nanami’s father, a salaryman dressed in a coat and tie in 1987, is a spry, restive retiree in 2004. His memorial trip to Hiroshima reveals the full extent of the Hirano family tragedy, but ends in hope for the future.

• Kyoto Ota, demure and starry-eyed, is a Hiroshima bomb-blast survivor. She admires, loves, and marries Asahi. She is the mother of Nanami and Nagio. She dies of radiation poisoning.

Artistic Style

The U.S. edition of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms preserves the original Japanese format, in which the book is bound on the right side and the story is read from right to left. Even though this implies having to read the book from the back, it avoids the unfortunate mirroring done to other manga, in which right becomes left, distorting the original visuals.

Kouno’s drawings are detailed and convey a fine picture of Japan from 1955 to 2004. Minami’s eating utensils, Asahi’s traditional wooden geta sandals, Nanami’s cell phone, and her coworker’s laptop are drawn in detail, as are the interiors and exteriors of their domestic and urban environment. Full-page panels introduce each story. The bombing is alluded to in a graphic manner through a full-page image of Hiroshima’s ruined Genbaku Dome (which becomes the center of Peace Park). In the upper left-hand corner of the scene, in which Minami views Genbaku Dome in 1955, Kouno adds two cherry trees that were not actually planted until 1956, foreshadowing a future her character would not live to see.

The realism of Kouno’s Artistic style captures the visual reality of the changes in Japan in five postwar decades. When Minami dies, the panels become white, featuring only the letters of her last thoughts. This color choice is particularly appropriate because white is the traditional color of death and mourning in Japan and other Buddhist Asian countries.

Themes

The physical and psychological effects of surviving the atomic bombing of Hiroshima are key themes of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. Text and pictures address issues of nuclear catastrophe, survival, the long reach of radiation poisoning, and the effects of the bombing on families. Nonetheless, Kouno finishes her story on notes of hope (strongly tied to the Buddhist idea of reincarnation) and on the importance of remembrance.

The theme of humanity’s resilience is visualized through the serenity of the manga’s opening pages, which feature a cheerful Minami walking barefoot along the river canal. Ten years after the catastrophe, a modicum of normalcy has returned, as depicted in the office scene with Minami and Furuta. But this normalcy is a transitory moment of respite, alluded to in the title. The yunagi, or evening calm, provides Hiroshima with a brief interlude between the afternoon’s sea breeze and the evening’s inland winds.

Minami cannot escape the past. She cannot even wear a short-sleeve shirt similar to the one she helps her friend sew. Minami’s arms bear scars from the radiation burns, indicated by patchy lines and seen in panels such as those in which she examines herself in the public bathhouse. Her death signals the impossibility of escaping fate.

There is hope, however, that life will carry on. As Minami’s brother marries Kyoko Ota, who survived the atomic bombing, the two newlyweds are shown standing on a rebuilt bridge in Hiroshima in a two-page panel. An undisclosed speaker, clearly Minami, says that she has decided to be (re)born as their child. Later, Nanami’s father remarks how much his daughter reminds him of his late sister.

Impact

In Japan, Kouno’s manga was celebrated for Artistically delivering a personal, humane, and subtle antiwar message. When Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms came out as a book in 2004, it quickly sold more than 180,000 copies. The manga helped Japanese readers to talk more about the issue of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a controversial subject in postwar Japan. Earning two major Japanese art awards, the graphic novel established Kouno’s reputation as major manga artist. It was even adapted into a literary text-only novel by Kei Kunii.

In the United States, Last Gasp Books published the manga in English in 2007. The manga’s ongoing success in Japan also accounted for a second, even more prestigious paperback edition in 2008. From April 24 to September 5, 2010, the Hiroshima Children’s Museum commissioned a fifty-minute planetarium show. Indicative of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms’ wide cultural appeal, the show combined animation and special effects with 130 frames from Kouno’s manga.

Films

Yunagi City, Sakura Country. Directed by Kiyoshi Sasabe. Fukuoka Broadcasting Systems, 2007. A live-action film, Yunagi City, Sakura Country adheres closely to the manga. The year in which Minami’s story takes place was changed from 1955 to 1958. The film premiered at the 2007 Cannes Festival. It opened for general release in Japan in July of that year. Kumiko Aso, portraying Minami, won three “Best Actress” awards for her role, from the Hochi Film Awards, the Mainichi Film Awards, and the Blue Ribbon Awards.

Radio Series

Yunagi City, Sakura Country. Directed by Kenji Shindo. Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), 2006. On August 5, 2006, the eve of the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Japan’s premier public radio station, NHK-FM, broadcast a radio play adaptation of Kouno’s graphic novel. Hirofumi Harada’s script followed the graphic novel closely, foregrounding the stories of Minami and Nanami. Popular Japanese television actor Kenji Anan was the voice-actor for Minami’s love interest, Uchikoshi, who, as in the film and novel version, was given the first name Yutaka, which was missing in the original graphic novel.

Further Reading

Asano, Inio. Solanin (2008).

Tezuka, Osamu. Ayako (2010).

Bibliography

Johnson-Woods, Toni, ed. Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives. New York: Continuum, 2010.

Lunning, Frenchy, ed. War/Time. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

Macwilliams, Mark, ed. Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime. Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2008.

Mihalsky, Susan. “Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms.” Library Media Connection 29, no. 5 (March/April, 2011): 76.