Salted Berries: The Remembrance and Reinterpretation of Women’s WWII Memories in Kyō Machiko’s Comics

Title

Salted Berries: The Remembrance and Reinterpretation of Women’s WWII Memories in Kyō Machiko’s Comics

Author

An-wen Chen

Page

111-152

DOI

10.6163/TJEAS.202506_22(1).0007

Abstract

Comics use visualized characters, dialogues, and frames as narrative media. When portraying historical subjects, it carries both the concreteness of images and the fictionality of characters' dialogues, setting it apart from official historical accounts and giving it the potential to create 'alternative narratives.' A notable example of this is the war comics presented by Kyō Machiko (今日マチ子). This paper examines two of Kyō Machiko's war comics: Cocoon (2009-2010), depicting the 'Himeyuri Student Nurses' in the Battle of Okinawa, and Paraiso (2015), portraying the Nagasaki atomic bombing, to observe how postwar-generation female artists reinterpret and mourn wartime experiences within their contemporary social contexts in the post-millennial era. Through textual analysis of these two comics, this paper explores Kyō Machiko's focus on three specialized themes: 'girl’s war perspectives,' 'anti-daily lives,' and 'war heterotopias,' and examines how the comics employ the politics of memory and mourning, to establish the unique women’s/post-war generation’s alternative narrative. Finally, the paper attempts to compare Kyō Machiko’s reconstructed Okinawan Campaign narrative with the literary works of the existing ‘Himeyuri Student Nurses’ novels and memoirs in post-war Japan and Okinawa, analyzing how Kyō Machiko engages with the main historical accounts and facts in her alternative narrative strategies and the significance of her contribution to Japan war comics.

Keyword

Kyō Machiko, People’s History, War Comics, Battle of Okinawa, Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki

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