Lucas Blogs About Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths

Yes, in certain lighting conditions the title and author's name are difficult to read.

So what's this book's de–Oh, hey! It's one of those mangaka you mentioned in our discussion of manga.

So it is. And it's one of the manga that he's best known for in America. Anway, Shigeru Mizuki's Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths is about a company in the Japanese Imperial Army in World War II and is based on Mizuki's own experiences as a soldier in the Pacific theater.

This isn't one some kind of right-wing apologia about the conduct of the Imperial Army in the period leading up to and including World War II?

No, it is explicitly not that. In fact, it's pretty much just about one company in the army over the course of a few months. The manga itself is episodic with each chapter following a couple of members of the Baien Battalion as they go through the drudgery of daily life in the army. We see new recruits being beaten by their commanding officers, soldiers waiting in line at a brothel, the prostitutes in said brothel singing a song about how much they hate working at the brothel, a soldier accidental stepping in a latrine and washing his foot in the water that's going to be used to cook rice the next day, soldiers with malaria being beaten for dereliction of duty. . .

This is starting to sound like a parade of misery.

That's kind of the point. Mizuki's project seems to be to demonstrate that being a soldier in the Imperial Army was anything but glorious. This is driven home in the character of the Battalion Commander, Takodaro, who's more interested in how his men die than in how they live.

Sounds like we're gonna be getting into SPOILER territory.

Well, as loath as I am to use that label, since the title kinda gives away the ending, sure. So, as American forces push further into Japanese occupied territory in New Britain, Takodaro orders his company into a suicide charge, including men who are ill and injured. Before the charge, he relays the fact that he has given this order back to army headquarters. However, in the course of the battle, several lower-ranking offiers order their men to retreat. When the remnants of the Baien Company arrive at headquarters, their officers are court-martialed and given the choice of execution or seppuku, and the rest of the men are sent out on a suicide charge once again, as their "noble deaths" have already been reported.

That is bleak.

It is bleak. That's the point. Throughout the book, the army dehumanizes the characters and reduces them into tools for a job. Whether it's the women in the brothel or the men out in the front, every character is at the mercy of a system that views them as nothing but an assemblage of body parts to be used and discarded. This objectification is made more explicit in a translator's note explaining the literal translation of the title.

The original title being?

総員玉砕せよ！ (Sōin Gyokusai Seyo!) which apparently could also be translated as "All Hands, Let's Die Honorably!" However, according to the translator, the word gyokusai was a wartime euphemism for dying in a suicide attack, and is written with the characters for "jewel" and "shatter."

Okay, you've made your point, it's really bleak.

Indeed. But there is also a kind of gallows humor throughout, whether it's the tragicomedy of a soldier choking to death on a fish or the soldiers' reprise of the prostitute's lament on the night before their suicide charge. Mizuki also finds unexpected pathos in the interactions between the two lieutenants who are forced to commit seppuku and the officer who witnesses their deaths.

You mean, the officer who kills them so that they don't have to slowly bleed out?

Is the material getting you down, Hypothetical Reader?

A little.

Well, the real story didn't end quite as bleakly.

What real story?

Well, I did mention that the manga is based on Mizuki's own experiences in the army.

Oh right?

The manga ends with a brief essay by Mizuki in which he explains that while the events of the manga are mostly based actual events, in reality about eighty men survived the suicide charge. He also addresses the way that the army treated soldiers as disposable:

Officers, NCOs, horses, soldiers: in the military hierarchy, soldiers were not even thought of as human beings. We were instead creatures lower than a horse. I wonder if surviving the suicide charge wasn't, rather than an act of cowardice, one final act of resistance as a human being. - Mizuki, Shigeru. Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. Drawn and Quarterly. Canada. 2018.

 So yeah, this is a thoroughly depressing manga. Anyway, you want to talk about something a little less bleak?

Yes.

Let's talk about the art.

Okay.

So, Mizuki's style in this book mixes cartoon-y character designs with nearly photo-realistic landscapes (in fact, I'm pretty sure some of the panels (particularly those featuring things like tanks and landing boats) are actually traced photographs). At first this might seem incongruous but the characters large heads and faces allow Mizuki to portray a broad array of expressions. However, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish characters from each other. This is perhaps why the book opens with a list of character portraits (the easiest character to recognize is Maruyama, who is a stand-in for Mizuki and looks identical to the way Mizuki draws himself in his historical/autobiographical manga Showa).

So, do you recommend Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths?

Well, yes and no. While it is excellent on it's own, it does cover a lot of the same ground as Showa which I had already read, and which puts Mizuki's wartime experiences into the broader context of the war and his own life. But then again, it's also shorter than any single volume of Showa, so if you're more specifically interested in this it's a worthwhile read.

There's the wishy-washy Lucas we know and . . . accept?

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki, Drawn + Quarterly trade paperback edition, Fourth Printing: May 2018, originally published in Japan as 総員玉砕せよ！in 1973, 372 pages, pairs well with quiet afternoons and contemplation

Links:

A lot of Mizuki's other manga are actually about yōkai, or ghosts and other monsters from Japanese Folklore, as you will notice when visiting the website for the Mizuki Shigeru Museum in his hometown of Sakaiminato.

Here's an article with some more information about Mizuki's anti-war manga, and a sample from "War and Japan" which has several similarities with his Showa manga from the eighties.

Here's a Japan Times interview with Mizuki from 2005, ranging on topics from his manga, to yōkai, to his military service, to the thoughts on the war in general.

And, sort of off topic, here's an article from the BBC examining the question of whether any film can truly be anti-war.