Start with Barefoot Gen Volume 1 and read the ten volumes in numerical order. There is no publication-versus-chronological argument here and no sub-series to untangle. The obvious alternative — beginning with the short version, I Saw It — is worth resisting, because the long work is the one that earns its material and the short one reads better afterwards as a document of how Nakazawa first told the story.
What a reader arriving here usually wants is not the order but the contents. Barefoot Gen is autobiographical. Keiji Nakazawa was six years old in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. His father, his older sister and his younger brother were trapped in the collapsed house and died in the fire that followed; his mother, in labour that day, gave birth to a daughter who died within months. All of that is in the book, drawn rather than described.
Volumes 1 to 4: the bombing
Barefoot Gen Volume 1 spends most of its length before the bomb, on the Nakaoka family in the last months of the war. Gen's father speaks against the war openly, and the family is treated as traitorous by neighbours and by the local authorities — bullied, denounced, short of food. This section is essential and is the part people skim in summaries: the bomb falls on a family the reader already knows and on a country the book has already shown as brutal to its own.
Barefoot Gen Volume 2, Barefoot Gen Volume 3 and Barefoot Gen Volume 4 are the aftermath — the burned city, bodies in the river, maggots in living wounds, radiation sickness arriving in people who appeared to have survived, and the black market and starvation of the following months. The drawing style is cartoonish, with round faces and slapstick timing, and it does not soften next to the atrocity; for many readers the collision is the most disturbing thing about the book.
Volumes 5 to 10: the occupation and after
The back half moves through the American occupation, the censorship of reporting on the bomb, the orphan gangs, discrimination against survivors in work and marriage, and Gen's own growing up and eventual departure for Tokyo. It is more openly polemical than the first half and more uneven. Nakazawa is arguing, not only remembering, and the argument takes in Japanese militarism, the emperor, and the treatment of Korean residents of Hiroshima, who appear through the character of a neighbour.
Many readers stop after volume 4. That is a defensible stopping point and it is where the book most people mean when they say Barefoot Gen ends. Reading on gives you something the first four volumes do not: what happens to survivors in the twenty years after the world stops paying attention.
The short version and the memoir
I Saw It is Nakazawa's 1972 autobiographical short, the piece he wrote before committing to the long serial. It covers the same events in a fraction of the pages and is the clearest single statement of why he made the work at all. Read it after volume 4, not before.
Our catalogue also holds a record filed simply as Hiroshima under Nakazawa's name; his prose memoir was published in English as Hiroshima: The Autobiography of Barefoot Gen, translated by Richard H. Minear, and covers his life including the making of the manga. It is the book to read last, when you want the account without the drawings.
Editions
The complete ten-volume English translation was published by Last Gasp between 2004 and 2009 and is the edition to buy; earlier English releases were partial and covered only the first few volumes. Volume numbering is consistent across the set, so ordering by number is safe. If you want more on the period rather than more of Nakazawa, Discover has reading paths on the war and its aftermath.
Follow the full ordered path here: Barefoot Gen Reading Order: Where to Start Keiji Nakazawa's Hiroshima Manga.
