Barefoot Gen Reading Order: Where to Start Keiji Nakazawa's Hiroshima Manga
Keiji Nakazawa was six years old and standing at his school gate in Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945. Barefoot Gen is the ten-volume manga he drew about it, and it is autobiographical in the ordinary sense: the atomic bomb kills Gen's father, sister and brother in volume one, and the remaining nine volumes are about what happens to the people who did not die. There is only one reading order, volume 1 through volume 10, but the book changes shape twice along the way, and these stages mark where. Two of Nakazawa's own non-fiction accounts close the path so you can see how much of Gen is testimony.
The Bomb
BeginnerRead the two volumes that cover wartime Hiroshima and the morning of the bombing, and understand why Nakazawa spends a whole volume on the family before destroying it.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: A week to ten days for the two volumes. Each runs roughly 250 to 280 pages of comics, so an unhurried volume is two to three hours; do not read them in one sitting. Read volume 1 and volume 2 straight through as a pair — they were conceived as one continuous account and the break between them is arb
- Nakazawa was six years old at his school gate in Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, and Barefoot Gen is autobiographical in the ordinary sense of that word
- Why the family comes first: 250 pages of ordinary life is what makes the deaths in the last stretch of volume 1 land on people the reader knows
- Wartime persecution of a dissenting family by their own neighbours — the antagonist of the first half is Japanese, not American
- Nakazawa's cartoon drawing style applied to atrocity, and the deliberate refusal to switch to a realist register when the bomb falls
- The bomb as an event with an inside: the flash, the blast, the fire and the trapped, in that order and at that scale
- The continuity of volumes 1 and 2 as a single account, and why stopping after volume 1 leaves the story at its worst point
- Why does Nakazawa spend two-thirds of volume 1 on the family before the bombing, and what would be lost by opening on 6 August?
- Who persecutes the Nakaoka family in the first half, and on what grounds?
- What does the father actually say about the war, and what does it cost the family?
- How does the drawing style change, or fail to change, at the moment of the flash?
- What is happening in the city between the end of volume 1 and the end of volume 2, in sequence — the fire, the black rain, the river, the search for survivors?
- Read the last thirty pages of volume 1 twice — once through, and once counting how many pages pass between the flash and the first death of a named character. The interval is deliberate.
- Keep a family sheet from the first chapter: every member of the Nakaoka household, ages, and what happens to each. You will be adding to it for ten volumes and the series does not recap.
- Mark the point in volume 2 where the story stops being about the bombing and starts being about the survivors. Different readers put it in different places; note your page and reasons, because volume 3 tests the judgement.
- Pick one page in volume 2 where Nakazawa's cartooning is doing something a photograph could not, and write down what. This is the central formal question about the whole series and it is best answered early.
Next up: The bomb has fallen and the family is destroyed, which is the point at which the series changes into what it mostly is: a long book about surviving afterwards.
Start here, and expect roughly two-thirds of the volume to be about a poor family being persecuted by their own neighbours because the father says the war is wrong. That ordinariness is the point: when the bomb detonates on the last stretch of the book it kills people you have spent 250 pages with, and Nakazawa draws the deaths of Gen's father, sister and brother without cutting away.
The first day and the weeks after: the burned city, the river full of bodies, the birth of Gen's sister in the ruins. Read it straight on from volume 1, because volumes 1 and 2 were conceived as one continuous account and the break between them is arbitrary.
Living in the Ruins
IntermediateFollow the years of scavenging, black-market survival and radiation sickness, and learn what the word hibakusha came to mean socially as well as medically.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Two weeks for the three volumes, roughly 260 to 270 pages each. Volumes 3 to 5 are the start of the long middle, which is episodic rather than driven — a chapter a night works better here than a volume a night. What these volumes contain, stated plainly: volume 3 has Gen taking on the care of a badl
- The shift from event to condition: the bomb is now a permanent circumstance rather than a thing that happened on one morning
- Radiation sickness as a second wave — the medical fact that people who were unhurt on the day died weeks and months later
- Hibakusha as a social category as well as a medical one, and how quickly it becomes a stigma
- Nakazawa's anger directed at Japanese targets: profiteers, officials and families who cast out their own sick relatives, which is part of why the series was controversial in Japan
- The orphan as the series' recurring figure, and Gen's assumption of care for someone worse off as the engine of the middle volumes
- Episodic structure as a deliberate choice — survival has no plot, and Nakazawa does not manufacture one
- What is Gen's relationship to the burned orphan in volume 3, and what does taking him on cost the surviving family?
- How does volume 4 explain radiation sickness, and how much of the explanation is what the characters actually knew at the time?
- Who are the villains of volumes 3 to 5, and what nationality are they?
- Why does the series get harder to read in these volumes even though the bombing is over?
- What is the black market doing in volume 5 — economically, not morally — and how does Nakazawa treat the people running it?
- Keep a running list of deaths from volume 3 onward with cause: blast, burns, radiation sickness, starvation, or something else. By volume 5 the distribution has shifted completely, and the list is the clearest evidence of what volume 4 is arguing.
- In volume 4, note every point at which a character explains what is happening to a sick person. The explanations are wrong in specific ways, and tracking them shows what was known when.
- Read one chapter of volume 5 looking only at how strangers treat each other, ignoring the plot. That reading is the middle volumes' actual subject.
- Compare a crowd scene in volume 5 with one in volume 1. The city is being rebuilt in the drawing before it is rebuilt in the story.
Next up: Survival has become routine and the occupation is about to become the story's main external force.
Survival becomes the subject. Gen takes on the care of a badly burned orphan and the series settles into its long middle mode: episodic, angry, and much more concerned with how survivors treat each other than with the Americans.
Radiation sickness arrives as a slow second wave, killing people who walked away from the blast unhurt. This is the volume that explains why the bombing is not an event with an end date.
The black market, the orphan gangs and the beginnings of a rebuilt city. Nakazawa is unusually hard here on Japanese profiteers and on families who abandoned their own irradiated relatives, which is part of why the series was controversial at home.
Occupation
IntermediateRead the volumes set under American occupation, and understand the censorship of atomic-bomb reporting and the discrimination survivors faced in work and marriage.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Two weeks for volumes 6 to 8, roughly 265 pages each. These read faster than volumes 3 to 5 — more dialogue, more argument, less scavenging — but they are the volumes where the series changes register most, so it is worth reading them close together. What they contain, stated plainly: volume 6 cover
- Occupation censorship of atomic-bomb reporting and research, which is a documented policy and a plot fact in volume 6
- Nakazawa's ambivalence about the Americans — food and suppression from the same authority — and why it is easier to follow after five volumes of established anger
- Discrimination against hibakusha in employment and marriage, which is the social half of the medical story volume 4 told
- The series turning openly polemical in volume 8, and the tonal distance from volume 1 that most readers notice exactly here
- Gen as an adolescent with opinions rather than a child with needs, and what that does to a book that had been about endurance
- Nakazawa as a participant arguing a case, not a neutral historian — the later volumes are advocacy and read best when taken as such
- What does the occupation give and what does it suppress, according to volume 6 — and can you name the specific mechanism of the suppression?
- Why would an employer or a family refuse a hibakusha in the late 1940s, in the terms the characters themselves use?
- Where exactly does the series stop being a memoir and start being an argument? Name a volume and a scene.
- What is Gen's political position by the end of volume 8, and how did he arrive at it?
- Does the shift into polemic strengthen or weaken the series' authority about the bombing itself?
- In volume 6, mark every scene involving an American and code it: help, harm, or both. The distribution is the answer to the ambivalence question and it is not what a first-time reader expects.
- Set the treatment of hibakusha in volume 7 beside your death-and-illness list from volume 4. The social consequences map onto the medical ones with a lag; find the lag.
- Read a volume 8 argument scene and write down the position each character holds in one line. Nakazawa gives his opponents real arguments more often than the reputation suggests.
- Reread ten pages of volume 1 immediately after finishing volume 8, and write two sentences on what has changed in the drawing as well as the writing.
Next up: Gen is nearly an adult and about to leave the city, which is where the manga ends and Nakazawa's own accounts become the way to check it.
The occupation becomes a presence rather than a rumour. Nakazawa's treatment of the Americans is not simple — they bring food and they suppress medical reporting on the bomb's effects — and the ambivalence is easier to follow once you have the earlier volumes' anger established.
Survivors start being refused jobs and marriages because of what radiation might have done to them. Read this as the social half of what volume 4 covered medically.
Gen is old enough to work and to argue, and the series turns openly political — on rearmament, on Korea, on what Japan was choosing to remember. The tonal shift from volume 1 is large, and this is where most readers notice it.
Leaving Hiroshima
IntermediateFinish the story, then read Nakazawa's own accounts of the day and judge how much of Gen is direct testimony.
▸ Study plan for this stage
Pace: Two weeks. Volumes 9 and 10 run about 265 pages each; then Hiroshima is a 216-page prose memoir and I Saw It is a 48-page comic that reads in half an hour. Read them in that order — the two manga volumes, then the memoir, then I Saw It — so the fiction lands before the testimony. What these contain,
- An ending that is a stopping point: Nakazawa drew the series for over a decade and ended it without resolving it, which is a fact about the work rather than a flaw in it
- The bomb still killing fifteen years on, which is volume 9's whole point and the strongest argument the series makes
- Gen leaving for Tokyo as autobiography — Nakazawa did exactly this, and the manga's ending is the memoir's beginning
- Testimony against fiction: the memoir tells you which parts of Gen happened, which is a different kind of authority from the manga's
- I Saw It as the first attempt — short, blunt, drawn in 1972 — and the direct account that gave Nakazawa the confidence to attempt ten volumes
- How much a long autobiographical work dramatises, and how to answer that question with the author's own non-fiction rather than by guessing
- What is still killing people in volume 9, and how long after 1945 is it set?
- Why does volume 10 end where it does, and would a resolution have been possible given what the series is?
- Which specific events in the manga does the memoir confirm, and which does it not mention?
- How does I Saw It differ from volume 1 in what it shows of 6 August — is anything in the short comic absent from the long one?
- Having read all ten volumes plus both non-fiction accounts, what would you say Barefoot Gen is for?
- Read I Saw It in one sitting immediately after the memoir, then reread the last thirty pages of volume 1. The same morning told three times, at three lengths, by the same man — the comparison is the point of the whole final stage.
- Take your family sheet from stage one and check it against the memoir. Mark every name the memoir confirms, changes or omits, and note where the manga has combined or invented a figure.
- List the events in volumes 1 and 2 that the memoir attributes to Nakazawa himself and the ones it does not. That list is the honest answer to how much of Gen is testimony.
- Write down, in five lines, what you would tell someone about to open volume 1 — what is in it, in plain terms, and why the first 250 pages are not a slow start.
- Pick the single page in the whole series you would show someone who says a comic cannot carry this subject, and write two sentences on why that page.
Next up: This is the end of the path: ten volumes in the only order they have, plus the two accounts by which the fiction can be checked against what Nakazawa says he saw.
The surviving family is pulled apart by illness and by the ordinary pressure of making a living. The bomb is now fifteen years in the past and still doing the killing.
Gen leaves for Tokyo to become an artist, which is what Nakazawa did. The ending is deliberately unresolved — he kept drawing the series for over a decade and stopped rather than concluded — so read it as a stopping point, not a resolution.
Nakazawa's prose memoir, and the book that tells you which parts of Gen happened. Our catalogue record displays the short title Hiroshima; the work is his full autobiography, published in English in 2010. Read it after the manga, not before, so the fiction lands first.
The short 1972 autobiographical comic Nakazawa drew before Gen, and the direct account that gave him the confidence to attempt ten volumes. Short, blunt, and useful as a check on how much the longer series dramatises.