Barefoot Gen By Keiji Nakazawa Sparknotes

The author of Barefoot Gen, Keiji Nakazawa, wrote his autobiographical book as a drama and anti - war book, he wrote this book as a comic which is a very odd way of writing a serious book such as this. The book was written after the author's own experiences about when he was a child in Hiroshima and the atomic bomb was dropped. He had experienced his family dying and the horrific fallout of the bomb after where he and his mother had to scramble for food and find out if his dead relatives he was seeing were hallucinations or not. Some people might think about the seriousness in this book and how it is a comic. Comics are more often seen by most people as children’s books, not a such a place for an autobiographical book with burn victims and many dead bodies and worse things. Just about every book, besides Barefoot Gen, about this subject would be novels with very few pictures unlike this, for example, when you search “Comics about Hiroshima bombing 1945”,
If you take in account that Nakazawa is Japanese, and that one of the most common types of writing in Japan is manga ( Which are basically Japanese comics ), it is arguable that the book was made for specifically for Japanese people and just translated into English. In the book, there were remarks by Gen which he was talking bad about Americans, saying stuff such as “Yankee bastards”. Gen saying this stuff leads me to think that the book wasn't meant for Americans, and the writer could of meant the book for the Japanese readers exclusively, which may explain why there are so many similarities to manga. The manga writing style is very similar to this as Barefoot Gen and manga both are comics from Japan, both have many pictures, and both were made in a similar time period. In this case, I think Nakazawa’s writing style is very appropriate if he is meaning to write this as a manga