Keiji Nakazawa
5The Turn · 50中沢 啓治
Born 1939
A survivor of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and the creator of Barefoot Gen.
5A 5 by its name: freedom seeker, and therefore the turn.
Life
Keiji Nakazawa was born in Hiroshima in 1939. On 6 August 1945, when he was six, the atomic bomb destroyed the city. His father, older sister and younger brother died, trapped in the family's burning house. He survived with his mother, who gave birth to a daughter soon after; the baby died within months.
Career
He moved to Tokyo and became a manga artist, at first avoiding the subject of the bomb. After his mother's death in 1966, when, he said, the cremation left almost no bones, he began to write about it. His short autobiographical story I Saw It appeared in 1972, followed by Barefoot Gen from 1973.
The work
Barefoot Gen (1973–1987) is his life's work. He spent the rest of his life speaking about the bombing and against war and nuclear weapons.
Why he matters
His work is among the most important testimony of the atomic bombing, read by millions in Japan and around the world. He died in 2012.
The name by its numbers
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 50 across 2 words, reducing to 5. The weight sits in “Keiji”, which carries 26 on its own and reduces to 8.
What the 5 brings is change. The reference files it as a turn. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 5's restlessness and hunger for change.
Heart's Desire 9, Personality 5: reckoning underneath, change on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
The letters give 5; the subject's own figures do not agree. 人格 core is 18, a 9, 総格 total is 30, a 3 and born is 1939, a 22. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because the romanisation is a convenience for readers abroad, while the strokes are what the pen name was actually built from.
The 5 asks you to ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. The other entries that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.