Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

A thousand years after the civilisation that used industrial weapons destroyed itself, humanity survives in pockets at the edge of a spreading toxic jungle populated by enormous insects.

Nausicaä, princess of a small valley kingdom, has an unusual capacity to understand the forest and its creatures, and finds herself moving between two empires at war and a set of people who want to burn the jungle away.

Two empires at war, and the thing that will outlast both is a forest they both want destroyed.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Miyazaki began the manga in 1982, made the film in 1984 from roughly its first two volumes, and then continued the manga for another decade.

The differences are substantial. The film ends in reconciliation; the manga goes considerably further, becomes far more politically complicated, and arrives at conclusions the film's structure could not support.

The toxic jungle is not simply a wound. The series reveals a process by which the forest is purifying the earth, and the poison is a by-product of that work rather than its purpose.

Miyazaki refuses the simple version of his own premise. The forest is not benevolent, the insects are genuinely dangerous, and the humans burning it have defensible reasons.

Most of the series is occupied with a conflict between two empires, complete with logistics, betrayals, succession disputes and the treatment of small states as terrain.

Miyazaki is unusually good on this. The war is not a backdrop; it is conducted by people with coherent strategic reasoning, and the small kingdom is crushed between them in entirely predictable ways.

She is compassionate, physically capable, and repeatedly complicit in violence she cannot prevent, and the series does not let her remain uncontaminated.

By the later volumes she has made decisions that are defensible and terrible, and the work's refusal to keep its protagonist clean is what separates it from the film.

The final volumes uncover the origin of the forest and of the current human population, and present a choice about whether a designed future is preferable to an uncertain one.

Nausicaä's answer is contested among readers and was reportedly contested by Miyazaki himself. It is not a comfortable conclusion and it is not framed as obviously correct.

The pages are extremely dense: small panels, heavy hatching, extensive dialogue and large casts, with battles rendered at a level of detail that requires slow reading.

It is not a quick book. Readers accustomed to the film's clarity frequently find the manga hard going for the first volume or two.

Miyazaki drew it in pencil rather than ink, which gives the reproduction a soft grey quality unlike almost anything else in the medium.

The creature design — particularly the Ohmu — is among the most distinctive in manga, and the landscapes carry a sense of scale that his animation achieves with movement.

A prophecy about a figure in blue robes runs through the series, and Nausicaä's relationship to it is deliberately ambiguous — she is used by people who believe it and does not obviously believe it herself.

Miyazaki treats faith seriously without endorsing it, and several manipulative uses of the prophecy are shown clearly for what they are.

It is the most substantial thing Miyazaki made outside animation and is generally considered more complex than any of his films.

Readers who know him only through Studio Ghibli usually find it darker, angrier and much less resolved than they expect, particularly in its final third.

The English edition is available as a seven-volume set or a two-volume boxed hardcover, both printed right-to-left with the pencil art reproduced at reasonable size.

The larger format is worth seeking out. Much of the detail in the battle sequences is simply illegible at smaller reproduction.

Readers willing to work. It is long, dense, politically complicated and unwilling to resolve its own arguments.

Readers who want Miyazaki's warmth will find it here in places, and will also find mass death, ecological despair and a heroine who becomes implicated in both. It is the least consoling thing he made, and the distance from the films is the point rather than an accident.