“Grave of the Fireflies” Akiyuki Nozaka (1968) Review | Guilt disappears
Grave of the Fireflies Akiyuki Nozaka, 1968 アメリカひじき 火垂るの墓 野坂明之 Japan Read in 2024.10 check on amazon.com (movie, not book)
✔ Made into a Ghibli movie ✔ Effect of the war on children ✔ Collection of short stories
🔽 Review summary 🔽
★★★★★ I still cannot watch the Ghibli film. Guilt disappears, but your hunger doesn't. You can visualise the horrible views the kids are seeing, and smell the death. They cannot live without help and death is too familiar.
🔽 Book review and notes 🔽 The Ghibli film is too well known, but I still cannot watch it and even less now that I have kids of my own.
Poverty, but extreme poverty where the war took everything and there's no other way than eventually die. There are no beautiful things like family or childhood, it's about how to survive that day, and if possible saving the little sister also.
The book also contains other short stories, about kids who did survive - but it doesn't mean they are not struggling. A vivid complex about the victorious Americans, or the guilt they carry because you are the only survivor among the siblings, or their will to do anything to live in the post war period.
Guilt disappears, but your hunger doesn't. What would you do to survive the day, or what can you do if you are only a child?
The most unexpected thing about the book is the description of sex and female body. America Hijiki talks about sex shows, yes that's an obvious one, but in one of the stories it talks about menstruation that starts even if your whole body is burned and wrapped, or they talk about removing ovary, or about pregnancy and raising children in general during the war. All the things that's absolutely normal, especially if you are a woman, but never talked about in the history, which is more often written by men.
赤パンの本棚 akapan's bookshelf 