WARNING:  This book contains EXTREME CONTENT + DISTURBING IMAGERY

Here in the 212 pages of Bubbles Press's follow-up to their premiere Maruo collection, Beautiful Monster, we are given another dose of the inimitable Maruo Suehiro's penetrating manga tales of trauma.  Drilling deep into the darkness of the unconscious, where dwell the demons spawned by guilt and shame, experiences subjected to, family histories inherited, actions taken and regretted (or not).

All created in the half decade spanning 1988 to 1993, five of these six tales focus on individual, family and peer group trauma and their after-effects through shifting combinations of allegory, symbolism, and more or less straightforward biographical and historical storytelling.  Infant murder, adolescent insanity, curses, self-extinguishing entitlement, and family corruption are among the themes explored, each tale occupying a place on the sadomasochism spectrum.

  
The collection’s final, novella-length piece,  “Nonresistance City” pulls out all the stops to present a synecdochal tale embodying the national trauma experienced by Japan in the wake of its defeat and surrender that concluded the Second World War.  Focusing on the dire poverty of a (likely widowed) mother and son just barely eking out a subsistence level existence in a shanty town, and an exploitative stranger (who happens to be a dwarf), the story careens through a pervasive sense of the carnivalesque absurd while the level of victimization experienced by the protagonists inexorably ratchets up to unbearable levels.  This is most emphaticalliy not a story for sensitive souls or the weak-hearted.  

And, just a head’s up:  look for the first English language translation (by Ryan Holmberg, natch’) of Maruo’s New National Kid from Bubble’s Press in the not too distant future…