Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki

We, the readers, are not just looking at a series of scenes in black and white what we are doing is try to make sense of the underlying question of “what is it all for”, where “it” refers to two interlocked matters: the matter of what war memories are for, and the matter of what war means for us human beings. The dialogue that comes into play, then, is such that instead of simply focusing in the “feeling” that we get from the pages (the feeling of anguish, despair) we are led to actually think and ponder. If war is Hell, this is not something we realize because we are being told so, turning us into passive spectators the uselessness of any kind of carnage should be a conclusion we come to because we take an active role in the interpretation of the events unfolding in front of our eyes. Instead of stating the problem, he prefers to show what really happened so that our response is natural, not guided by another person’s (the artist’s) own preconceptions. Mizuki, in fact, does not intrude into the flow of the reading as to highlight what his stance is. Whatever we are to make of it, so the novel seems to imply, is something that should come out of our own pondering over what we are reading. Memory plays the role of truth, as the writer/artist asks us to listen carefully to what he has to say, never taking the position of someone who wants to give a blunt final judgment over what happened in those days in South-East Asia. As the author states in the interview (it can be found at the end of the book), the story here told is not fiction: 90% of what we see, Shigeru says, really happened. Shigeru Mizuki’s anti-war graphic novel, Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths therefore, focuses not only on the horror of war, but also on war as seen from a new point of view, that of those who would later lose: the Japanese. There must be something more, then, to just writing down on paper a series of events, whose interpretation cannot be left as a matter of personal choice.

There is, nonetheless, a question we need to ask ourselves: what is the purpose of having people tell us what happened on the battlefields? If the idea is simply to know what went on during those days, having people repeat the same stories with minor changes in their details (we waited, we shot, we killed, we won or we lost) is more of an exercise in style than in meaning. The only way we can hope not to lose their voices is by asking them to record their individual stories. One day (not too far in the future) there will be no one left to tell what happened in those trenches, beaches, deserts, and vineyards. There are not many people left who fought in the Second World War.

Published in English by : Drawn & Quarterly Year : 2018 (first publication 2011) First published in in Japanese in Kodansha magazine Shukan Gendai, 1973

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki