Barefoot Gen, Volume 3: Life after the Bomb

by Keiji Nakazawa

Overview

Barefoot Gen Volume Three ―"Life After the Bomb" ―picks up the story with Gen, his mother and his baby brother searching for a place to rest in the bomb's aftermath. Facing rejection, hunger, and humiliation, they come to realize that they still have ―and can share ―three crucial possessions: their self-respect, their hope, and their inner strength.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780867195941
Publisher:	Last Gasp of San Francisco
Publication date:	09/30/2005
Series:	Barefoot Gen Series , #3
Edition description:	New
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	146,650
Product dimensions:	5.75(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	15 - 18 Years

About the Author

Nakazawa was born in Hiroshima, and was six years old when the city was destroyed by an atomic bomb in 1945. All of his family members who had not been evacuated died in the bombing, except for his mother, and an infant sister who died several weeks after the bombing. Compelled to tell his story in the memory of his family, Keiji Nakazawa is best known for his epic tragic history Barefoot Gen.

Editorial Reviews

The third volume in Nakazawa's ongoing chronicle of wartime Japan opens in August 1945 as young Gen, his mother and newborn sister prepare to leave the nightmarish remains of Hiroshima in search of an old family friend who may provide them with food and shelter. But the surrounding countryside, unharmed by the blast, has been overrun by refugees from the city. The rural citizens are terrified of the bomb's survivors--many are gruesomely ill with radiation sickness--and, after years of suffering from war-imposed food shorages, are suspicious, cruel and bitterly self-protective, turning away the needy Gen and his ilk. A Hiroshima survivor, Nakazawa pens a bracingly realistic tale of the human consequences of ultimate warfare; his handsome, cartoonish black-and-white illustrations richly detail WW II Japan. Young Gen's courage, determination and amiability are often melodramatically sentimental, but the apocalyptic conditions he and his family must endure are a plausible basis for his transformation from boy to man. Any comic committed to this level of unstinting verisimilitude deserves our attention. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly