In This Corner of the World Is a Powerful Wartime Chronicle Told in Manga

The opening chapter is like something from a storybook: Little Suzu is sent to town to deliver a bundle of seaweed and is kidnapped by an ogre and popped into a basket with a slightly older boy. She manages to trick the ogre and free them both. It’s an odd episode that seems out of place among the more realistic scenes that follow, but Kouno weaves her story out of many different threads, and by the end, it is clear this one is part of the pattern.
After that, we get a clearer look at Suzu and her family, the Uranos, who are seaweed harvesters in the town of Eba, not far from Hiroshima, in the 1930s. Kouno deftly recreates this vanished world, showing Suzu and her family drying seaweed on latticed frames, walking across the flats at low tide, and running to school on a cold day. Everyone is very cute—short and chubby, with childlike proportions—and Kouno’s long panels of children running single file evoke children’s picture books of the 1930s.
Once we get to know the Urano family, the story skips ahead to 1943. It’s wartime, but that’s still in the background at first. Suzu is a young woman now, and when a stranger, Shusaku Hojo, asks her parents for her hand in marriage, they agree without even consulting her. By the time she gets home from a visit to relatives, it’s a done deal, and soon she moves to Kure, a port city about 15 miles from Hiroshima, to live with her new family.
Shusaku is shy and very sweet, and Suzu gets along well with her mother-in-law, who is a semi-invalid, but Shusaku’s older sister, Keiko, is hostile to her from the start, making nasty comments about her clothes and telling her that the family pressured Shusaku to get married because they needed someone to care for his mother. Suzu is remarkably calm in the face of these criticisms, and when Keiko moves back in with the family, the reasons for her bitterness become clear.
As the family drama unfolds, Kouno devotes time to the details of everyday life. She depicts Suzu cutting up a kimono to make it into everyday clothes, using herbs and various tricks to transform and stretch the wartime rations, and making fuel from scraps and waste. Suzu has a special talent for drawing, and she often uses her skill to cheer people up or alleviate a tense situation. She is naïve, and her in-laws regard her as an airhead; a running joke is that whenever she is carrying a pole or a yoke, she knocks people over. One day a military policeman discovers her sketching warships in the harbor and accuses her of espionage. He brings her home and yells at the family, who appear to be terrified—but as soon as he leaves, they double over with laughter at the thought of Suzu being a spy.

There’s more to Suzu than meets the eye, though. The story slowly deepens as her relationship with her husband matures and is tested as she learns more about the world around her, and as she becomes friendly with Keiko’s young daughter, Harumi. At the same time, the hardships of the war become more pronounced. The food gets worse, and Suzu must buy groceries on the black market. Women are constantly being called in to do volunteer work for the local Women’s Association, which they do gladly, because they truly believe their country is on the right side of the war. The family builds a bomb shelter, and at first it’s a bit of a joke, but once the bombings begin, the toll soon becomes real: people die. Homes are destroyed. No one makes it through unscathed, but grief must take a back seat to the continuing struggle for survival.
And then, as we have known will happen from the beginning, the Americans drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. Kouno shows this indirectly: the characters see the flash of light and the mushroom cloud in the distance. What she depicts most clearly is the cost of the bomb on those left behind: corpses in the streets, destroyed homes, frantic searches for missing relatives and friends, and the aftereffects of exposure. And then the emperor goes on the radio to tell his people that Japan has surrendered. The world is left in tatters, the family has suffered terrible losses, and in the end, it was all in vain.
Nonetheless, Kouno ends the story on a hopeful note, one that would be saccharine in less skilled hands. But works, because it reaffirms, in the larger and the smaller strokes, everything we have learned about Suzu and her family. Kouno weaves her story like a tapestry, dropping a thread for a while and then bringing it back. Events from the beginning of the book are revisited toward the end, and the careful reader will see even side characters, such as the ladies in the women’s association, change as the story goes on; one pair of women who start out bickering end up supporting one another as things get worse.
Kouno’s art is breathtaking, especially when she devotes a double-page spread to a landscape or a streetscape. She draws mountains, city streets, domestic interiors, and the battleships in the harbor with equal enthusiasm. The most terrifying page in the book is not the mushroom cloud, but a splash page showing rows of airplanes suddenly filling the sky in arcs like a demented black-and-white rainbow, as Suzu rears back in fear and surprise.

In This Corner of the World fills an important gap in English-language literature. While much has been written about life in Europe during World War II, Japan has remained more of an enigma. A handful of manga have depicted different aspects of wartime life: Shigeru Mizuki’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths was a first-person account of the military side, while Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen drew on the author’s own memories of life in Hiroshima from the day the atomic bomb was dropped, when he was six years old, through the postwar years; the Studio Ghibli film Grave of the Fireflies is also a hyper-focused but poetic elegy on the destruction wrought by the bomb. In This Corner of the World is an unusual glimpse of the home front during the war, showing a side of Japan that we seldom see: Ordinary people making do with short rations, helping their neighbors, making sacrifices for the greater good, mourning their dead. They may have been on the other side of the world, and on the other side of the war, but in the end, they were just ordinary people living in extraordinary times, doing their best to survive as individuals, as a family, and as a community.
The book has been adapted into an anime film, also titled In This Corner of the World.