Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
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"Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms"
By: Nadia OxfordDate: Sunday, April 22, 2007
Tragedy is a curious animal. It can draw communities closer together and remind everyone how quickly a life can be snuffed out. At the same time, it often silences its survivors to the point nobody recalls the Incident out loud or acknowledges its lingering effects. The story of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, is based around the silence from the hibakusha -- the survivors of the atomic bomb and their descendents.
The manga begins in 1955, ten years after Little Boy is dropped on Hiroshima. A young woman named Minami works and lives with her mother in a small shanty town cobbled together by bomb survivors who lost their homes in the blast. Their lives, at first glance, are seemingly happy and uncomplicated, but something isn't right about the inhabitants of the town. The past, Minami notes, only exists in the faded scars and burns laid on the backs of the of the women in the community bathhouse. Nobody talks about the bomb. Minami herself doesn't understand the nature of the enemy that tried to kill them, nor does she understand why, after ten years of calling herself a "survivor," she contracts the same deadly sickness that killed her sister shortly after the bomb fell.
The second half of the story, titled Country of Cherry Blossoms, takes place in 1985, thirty years after Town of Evening Calm. A tomboy named Nanami follows her father as he takes a trip to Hiroshima to visit the town he stayed in through his college years. Trailing his visits to graves and old acquaintances, she slowly pieces together his past and his history with Minami, his sister who died of delayed radiation poisoning in 1955.
Though she doesn't know it, Nanami asks herself many of the same questions her late aunt did. Nanami's mother and grandmother also died of delayed radiation sickness, but no one will talk directly about the cause of their deaths. But unlike Minami, Nanami receives some indication of the controversy that surrounded (and still surrounds) hibakusha. Her brother, Nagio, is in and out of the hospital for what her family insists is treatment for asthma, but some years after he's better, he is asked by his girlfriend's family to please stay away.
Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms handles its controversial subject matter tactfully, but is still packed with emotion. Given manga's tendency to ramble for volumes, having an unforgettable (and beautifully illustrated) story told within a brisk 100 page count is a welcome change. Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms is printed on high-quality glossy paper and still retails for the average manga price of $9.99.
