#summer fable

HEAR ME OUT...

WHAT IF...

I'll spare you the long and winded road that got me to Yamagishi Ryouko's Tennin Karakusa (天人唐草) one shot collection... I was supposed to find the bunkoban edition of it, but because I did my research half-assedly, I got the scans from the 1980 collection with the same title. I was bummed that I didn't get the one shot I was looking for (which was 狐女 (Kitsunejo-Fox Lady, 1981) btw), and was skimming through the one shots in the 1980 book in mild disappointment. The last page of one of the stories caught my eye, because of the text taking up the bottom of the page and my brain going "Huh? Isn't that Hiroshima Peace Memorial?". When I read the first line of what's written on that page, I almost fell off my chair. I KNEW what it was. It was a poem by the great Turkish poet Nazım Hikmet, Hiroshima Child (Kız Çocuğu, 死んだ女の子, 1956).

Now, I had to read this one shot. Natsu no Guuwa (夏の寓話 - Summer Fable) was first published in the 1976 August issue of Seventeen magazine, and later compiled in a bunch of books I'm too lazy to list here. None of them are available as e-books anyway, so it wouldn't be of much use... I'll revisit the list when I buy one of them, because I know I will buy a copy for myself.

The story takes place in Hiroshima during a hot, hot summer. University student Sumio has to spend his summer home sitting and taking care of fish and birds, and getting bored to death. He comes across a girl in the park who never plays with the other kids and who is always alone. The two get closer, however, the girl is acting strange and can't even remember her own name. Sumio tries to figure out her circumstances, only to find that she is the ghost of a little girl who died during the Hiroshima bombing in 1945.

I couldn't find any background info on this, but I'm almost positive that this is a manga adaptation of Nazım Hikmet's poem, and the poem is not there as a decoration. The imagery used in the poem, the little girl knocking on doors (windows, in this case), her burning and turning into ash, is weaved into the story in a most striking way. It's not telling the real-life story that made Nazım (yes, we call him by his first name) write that poem, but a whole new story based on the poem itself. I LOVED Yamagishi's take on this literary work, and felt elated to see a compatriot in a manga by an artist I respect a lot.

It is also in one tiny panel, but there is a guy criticizing the younger generation for being "apolitical" in this manga (see: しらけ世代), which I found interesting. Is Yamagishi condoning people who belong to that generation? Does she criticize the youth dor being apolitical and not caring about their country? Or is she trying to show that despite appearances, they care in their own way? As I'm not Japanese and I wasn't even alive in 1976, I lack the proper background to make a sound assessment on that. But still, it made me aware such concerns also existed in Japan. Isn't this the beauty of reading older manga? They make you think about stuff you'd normally wouldn't think about with a single bubble.

I drew Summer fable because she is BEAUTIFUL-- 💕💖💕💖