August 6, 1945. Needless to say: the hell caused by the first atomic bombing of Hiroshima left the world speechless. Keiji Nakazawa was just a six-year-old boy that day, the sky exploded and consumed everything in its path in a fireball that burned above 5000 degrees. Miraculously, he survived, sheltered by the school wall, while the woman he was talking to received a direct hit of heat and radiation that turned him into an ash statue. It’s hard to imagine what that boy went through, but decades later, Nakazawa decided to describe this horror first in short stories that recalled images that burned in his memory by nuclear fire, then began a longer story of more than 2,000 pages. It would take him almost ten years to finish Hadashi no Gen, which was republished in a careful four-volume reprint as Pies descalzos in Spain. A Story of Hiroshima, by Keiji Nakazawa (Manga Zone, translated by Víctor Illera and Maria Serna).
It is not easy to speak heartbreakingly about a work that can fit into a hundred pages the greatest horror humanity has ever seen. Nakazawa proves to be a gifted storyteller, an outstanding Tezuka student who introduces the reader to the difficult life of a war-torn family, as well as the harassment of neighbors who branded the cartoonist’s father as patriotic for his anti-war ideals. It is not difficult to empathize with the pain of those who entered the life of Little Gen de’s family hand in hand, those who were beaten, those who were not given food, and those who were stoned because they wanted peace and refused to take up arms. , laughing at their misfortune and cursing the misfortunes that befell them, recognizing the reality of a society not as monolithic as the propaganda claims, discovering the difficulty of living in Hiroshima every day without needing it. more complex.
But then, at an altitude of 2,000 feet, Little Boy blew up.
A flash of light that blinds those who dare to look. An unstoppable whirlwind of wind and fire that destroys everything. And the deadly radiation that contaminates everything. Just a few seconds to ruin the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. A very short time frame to change the past. Nakazawa’s memories are as clear as his drawings: the endless suffering of some survivors seeing their flesh thaw, the drama of seeing loved ones consuming helplessly, or the screams of the dying as an omnipresent voice intermingle until they form a story. for the reader to know that the stories told are true. It is Goya’s phrase “I saw” taken to the height of human cruelty.
But the author continues to tell his story with an even scarier story: what happened after the bomb. Mountains of rotten corpses, unbearable stench, clouds of flies, or continuing to kill radiation slowly mingled in a decaying country after defeat, where the law of the fittest was the only rule. Memories of human misery, which Nakazawa narrates without sparing a single detail, without leaving a small space for compassion, creating an intolerable reflection against war, and an anti-war masterpiece, which is also one of the greatest representatives of the ninth art.