Gen's compassion, humanity, and determination makes this an inspiring book about the strength of the human spirit. This the hardest of the four books to read because the carnage of the day after the bomb is almost beyond belief. Alone he faces the horror of the devastation and the destitution of the people of Hiroshima. Gen goes in search of food for his mother whose breast milk has dried up from malnutrition. No one understands what is happening and there is no one to turn to. Even the soldiers sent in to gather and burn the dead bodies are succumbing to the radiation sickness and dying. They have no food or shelter and are surrounded by the dead and dying.
Based on the real-life experiences of the author, Gen, his mother, and his newborn sister face the horrors of the day after the bomb. It tells the story of the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima as seen through the eyes of seven year old Gen Nakaoka. ***īarefoot Gen: The Day After is volume two of a four part series. Or, if you're a completist, read the book first and come back to the introduction afterwards, so it won't taint you. Ironically, Barbara Reynolds' introduction to this edition is a perfect contrast to Nakazawa's story it's awfully-written, ham-handed, flat-out wrong (Reynolds harps on about American denial of responsibility for Hiroshima, and she's writing ten years or more after the release, and vast popularity, of John Hersey's Hiroshima) polemic whose sole purpose in inclusion, it seems, is to highlight how subtle Nakazawa is. Nakazawa, as is his wont, tells us all this in his stories, and never allows his messages to get in the way of his storytelling. Gen meets a number of different people, helps some, and learns that even after the bomb, when everyone around him is shrouded in misery and horror, the banality and prejudice around him doesn't disappear- in fact, people are worse than they were beforehand. Gen's task during this time is to find food for the family, and this quest takes him on a number of small side adventures the present a much larger picture of the greater Hiroshima area after the bomb than the first book provided of Hiroshima before the bomb. The Day After (which, in fact, covers the next two days) opens just after the end of Barefoot Gen, and is concerned entirely with the survival of Gen, his mother, and his baby sister Tomoko. It's not a stretch to predict that how you feel about The Day After will probably reflect how you felt about Barefoot Gen, without much variance. The story of Barefoot Gen, spunky atomic bomb survivor, continues in this second volume of the four-part series. Keiji Nakazawa, Barefoot Gen: The Day After (New Society, 1988)
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