Barefoot Gen

9Nine — reckoning. That is the reduction of this title, and the shelf it is read from.

What it is

Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen began in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1973 and, after it left Jump, continued in a series of smaller magazines until 1987. It was collected in 10 volumes. Gen Nakaoka is a boy in Hiroshima during the Second World War. His father, an artist, openly opposes the war, and the family is persecuted by neighbours and police as traitors. On 6 August 1945 the atomic bomb falls.

How it works

Gen's father, sister and younger brother are trapped under their burning house, and Gen and his pregnant mother cannot save them. The first volumes show the bombing and its immediate aftermath in unflinching detail: burned bodies, radiation sickness, starvation and the collapse of the city. Later volumes follow Gen through the occupation years, as he fights to survive, cares for orphans and grows up.

From life

The story is closely based on Nakazawa's own experience. He was six when the bomb fell, and lost his father, sister and brother in the same way. He had already told the story directly in a short autobiographical work, I Saw It (1972), before turning it into a long-form series.

Why it matters

It is one of the most important works of war testimony in any medium, and has been read by generations of Japanese schoolchildren. Volunteer translators carried it into English and many other languages, and its anime films (1983, 1986) brought it to more viewers. Its graphic violence and its criticism of the wartime emperor system have also made it the subject of repeated arguments over whether it belongs in school libraries.

The title by its numbers

Barefoot37Gen17total54 → 9

総画 strokes18 → 9volumes10 → 1years serialised15 → 6debut year1973 → 2

Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 54, which folds down to 9. The weight sits in “Barefoot”, which carries 37 on its own and reduces to 1.

Nine is humanitarian & sage — endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles. The reference files it as a completion. Read that way, what the entry is really recording is the 9's sense of a cycle closing and something being released.

The vowels alone reduce to 5, the consonants to 4. Change underneath, foundation on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.

Counted another way the answer holds. 総画 strokes is 18, a 9, volumes is 10, a 1, years serialised is 15, a 6 and debut year is 1973, a 2, and 総画 strokes reduces to the same 9. Two systems, one figure.

The 9 sentimentalises. An ending is not automatically a meaning, and the reference tries not to pretend otherwise. What the 9 still asks is that you work out what survived the ending. The other entries that reduce to 9 are collected on The Closing.