Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms
Fumiyo Kouno, writer/artist
Last Gasp, 2006
104 pages
$9.99
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Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms is an exercise in addressing a bottomlessly complicated subject in a breezily simple fashion. That complicated subject is the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and its lingering physical, psychological, and sociocultural side-effects on residents of the town and their families. That simple fashion is Kouno's writing, which sort of brushes against the topic like a breeze while telling stories of romance, friendship, and family, only to occasionally slam into it with gale-force intensity; and Kouno's art, the pictorial equivalent of young-adult prose, warm and just so. (And it takes some kind of mental masterstroke to make your characters look like Peanuts when you superdeform them.)

As such it's perhaps fitting that simple things keep the book from really doing all it might otherwise be capable of doing. For one thing, in both of the stories (one set in the '50s, the other in the '80s and '00s) the main characters simply look like little kids even when they're supposed to be in their 20s. Since so much of the plot is driven by looking into the past and contrasting children with adults, it's becomes a major obstacle to understanding just what's going on--particularly in the second story, which was already too loosely constructed by half. Another flaw, and this is maybe nitpicky, is the typeface used for translated Japanese text. Comic Sans? The cover is lovely so I know someone at Last Gasp makes good design decisions, but that wasn't one of them, and it knocks me out of the story whenever it shows up.

But those complex moments...they hit hard. The first story, "Town of Evening Calm," could with minimal tweaking become a first-rate horror story, so powerful is the way its sense of impending, at-any-moment suffering and death sneaks up on the reader. Two moments in particular--I don't want to spoil them--practically reach out of the book and punch you in the face, a testament as much to Kunuo's pacing as to the horror of the topic itself. The second, two-part story, "Country of Cherry Blossoms," relies more heavily on knowledge of the stigma victims of the Bomb (and even their descendants) face in Japan for its power, knowledge I didn't really have, sad to say; but the way it develops the ticking-time-bomb themes established in "Town" creates a satisfying sense of connectedness that the two otherwise unrelated stories lack. The flaws irk, the strengths stick.

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