Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms Manga Profile and Story Summary

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms (English)
Yunagi no Machi Sakura no Kuni (Japan)

Author and Artist: Fumiyo Kouno

• Last Gasp (US)
  
• Futabasha Publishers Co. Ltd. (Japan)

• Josei (Women's) Manga
• Gekiga (Graphic Novels)
• Drama
• Historical

Not rated, however it does depict wartime horrors
More about content ratings.

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms was a bestseller when it was released in Japan, and also won several notable awards, including the Grand Prize at the 8th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2004, and the New Life Award at the 9th Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prizes in 2005. It was also named one of the Top Five Best Comics of 2007 by New York Magazine and selected as a Top 10 Graphic Novel for Teens by the American Library Association in 2008.

A live action film version of Yunagi no Machi, Sakura no Kuni was released in Japan in July 2007.

Fumiyo Kouno was born in 1968 in Hiroshima, Japan. She started drawing manga when she was in junior high school, and worked as an assistant to several manga artists, including Katsuyuki Toda, Aki Morino and Fumiko Tanigawa. She made her professional debut with her first manga, Machikado Hana Dayori in 1995.

Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms is two separate, but related stories about two young women who are separated by a generation, but share one thing in common – they must deal with the after effects of the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II.

The first story, Town of Evening Calm, focuses on Minami, a young seamstress who lives in the post-war shantytown slums along the river. It's ten years after the end of the war, but Minami is haunted by memories of what she saw that day after the bomb's impact, and the friends and family she has lost since then.

The second and third stories in this three-story suite revolve around Nanami, Minami's niece. In Country of Cherry Blossoms Part 1, we meet Nanami when she's a grade-school tomboy who loves to play baseball.

In Part 2, the story encounters Nanami again when she's in her twenties. Her youthful innocence is replaced by the heartache that comes from losing her mother and grandmother to the lingering effects of the bomb. Nanami has noticed that her elderly father has been behaving strangely lately, so she follows him on a mysterious pilgrimage to Hiroshima to visit old friends and memories of the past. Through a series of flashbacks, we see the love that bloomed between Nanami's parents despite the hardships they encountered after the war, and the budding relationship between Nanami's best friend Toko and her brother Nagio.

Main Characters

Nanami Ishikawa
Nanami is Minami's young niece. She's a tomboy who loves baseball, but yearns to be a pretty, polite girl like her best friend Toko. When we catch up with Nanami again, she's an older and wiser young woman in her twenties. Lately, she's noticed that her father Asahi has been behaving strangely, so she follows him as he makes a secret pilgrimage back to Hiroshima to visit old friends.

Asahi Ishikawa
Minami's younger brother Asahi was sent to live in the country during wartime, and as a result, was not exposed to the radiation from the atom bomb. But Asahi returns to his hometown as a college student to check on his mother, and meets young Kyoka Ota, a girl who is also an atom bomb survivor, who later becomes his wife, and mother to his daughter, Nanami.

Toko Tone
Pretty and polite Toko is Nanami's neighbor and best friend. Although Nanami and her brother Nagio move away from the neighborhood, when they're children, the old friends reunite, as Toko becomes a nurse where Nagio is doing his medical internship and their friendship turns to a budding relationship.