Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths

A Japanese unit is stationed on New Britain in 1943, starving, diseased and strategically irrelevant. Their commanders order a suicide attack for the honour of the regiment, and then order the survivors to die properly when some of them live.

Mizuki calls it ninety per cent fact, and he lost his left arm in the same campaign.

Ordered to die for honour, and then ordered again when some of them survived it.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

He was conscripted, served in New Guinea, contracted malaria, survived an Allied attack that killed his unit, and lost his arm to a bomb.

He drew for the rest of his life with his right hand. The authority of this book comes directly from that experience and the anger in it is undisguised.

The target is not the enemy but the Japanese command structure: officers who valued the appearance of honour over their men's lives, and a system in which surrender was unavailable.

The book is explicit that the soldiers were killed by their own army's logic, and that the deaths achieved nothing whatsoever.

The men are drawn as ordinary, frightened, hungry and frequently petty, with no heroism available to them.

Mizuki refuses to ennoble them. They steal food, bully each other and want to live, and the refusal to make them admirable is what makes their deaths land.

The style is jarring and deliberate: cartoonish, rubbery figures placed against backgrounds of extraordinary photographic detail.

The jungle, the equipment and the terrain are rendered with obsessive precision while the people are drawn simply, and the mismatch is the book's defining formal choice. Mizuki traced the landscapes from photographs and from memory, and the jungle is drawn with a density that makes the cartoon soldiers look temporary inside it.

There is a substantial amount of humour, mostly about food, rank and bodily functions, and it sits directly against the atrocity.

Mizuki's comic register is how he makes the material survivable, and the jokes stop entirely in the final section. It is also how the soldiers themselves are shown coping, so the jokes are characterisation as well as relief, and their disappearance marks the point at which coping stops.

The final sequence is among the bleakest in the medium, and Mizuki has said he could not bring himself to depict certain things accurately.

The acknowledgement is in the book itself, which is an unusual admission and one that increases rather than diminishes its authority.

It is a first-hand account by a participant, published in 1973 when Japanese public discussion of the war was still constrained.

Its position in the literature is comparable to Barefoot Gen's: a survivor using comics to say something the culture preferred not to hear. Mizuki also returned to the subject repeatedly across his career, and this is the most concentrated of those accounts and the angriest.

A single volume of around three hundred and seventy pages, which is self-contained and can be read in a sitting.

The concentration matters. A longer version would have dissipated the effect, and the book ends exactly where its argument concludes. Mizuki published it in a magazine that permitted long-form work, which was not generally available, and the book exists in that form largely by chance.

He is best known for GeGeGe no Kitarō, a long-running comic folklore series, and for Showa, a multi-volume history of twentieth-century Japan.

The range is unusual: the same author produced children's monster comics and this, and the connection between them is his interest in what Japan chooses to remember.

Drawn and Quarterly published it in English in 2011 with translation notes and a biographical afterword.

The apparatus is useful, particularly on the military ranks and the campaign, which a reader without background will otherwise find hard to place. Translator Jocelyne Allen's notes also explain several specifically military terms that have no English equivalent, which materially helps a reader follow the chain of command.

Readers interested in war literature, in comics as testimony, or in Japanese accounts of the war from below.

It is short, difficult and important. Readers should expect the comic drawing to make the content harder rather than easier, which is precisely what it is for.