A play about a convict murderer in which the narrator is also the dead brother of the woman who is chastising the convict.

Itsubun fairly recently posted about Hiroki Endo’s manga short “Hang”. The post blew me away with its striking conclusions, and then I read the manga and was fairly impressed. What really got my attention was “For Those Of Us Who Don’t Believe In God.”

“Don’t believe” is about a play being put on by a student theater troupe, and while the main theological enquiries come about through the play, the human perspective is well played out in the side stories of the characters. The theater troupe puts on a play written by one of its own, and the play is about a woman confronting the convict who killed her brother just before his execution. The play carries on as one would expect, the sister no longer believes in God or heaven while the convict is portrayed as an intelligent man who knows of his transgressions, but refuses to believe in heaven or hell.

This isn’t very surprising to me, often those who suffer heavy tragedies don’t believe in or care about God, but the way Endo attributes every last fallacy of his characters as products of child abuse or molestation,is a bit disconcerting. Surely if a child is abused he or she won’t grow into a sadist who writes plays about serial killers (the author of the play) or the masochist who continues to return for more beatings (the author’s girlfriend). The rest of Endo’s characters in his other short stories meet similar depressing fates. It reeks of Bokurano’s vantage point of the human condition.

But in the end we experience catharsis as the dead brother asks his sister to no longer hate the convict as the convict will soon be coming to the brother’s side of “nothingness”. This request seems to be Endo reaching through the page/screen and asking us to forgive one another. He shows us our human drama in the form of the side stroies of the cast and crew of the play, and then he tells us to just forget. There is no heaven of hell there is only nothingness after we die. So we can’t waste our time on hating people no longer around.

Humans constantly define their lives by their knowledge or lack thereof of the next stage of life. We are born we live for a while we die. In that short time we die most of us are exposed to some sort of philosophy or religion which attempts to explain what comes next. we duel and we fight as to who is right and who is wrong. Some people need the crutch of religion and some don’t. We as humans are too busy looking forward and trying to settle our cosmic debts before we get to wherever it is we are going, that we can’t just stop and observe the natural beauty that is on the earth regardless of atheist or christian.

Bokurano is a manga about kids that will die trying to save the 10 billion people on the earth. This concept is nothing new, and is quite often quoted in the dialogue. It does pose some interesting questions on the darker side of the human condition.

Bokurano is essentially nauseating. The author is blatantly abusive to his characters, as is evident by his previous work Shadow Star. It features; incestuous close-calls(between a daughter whoring herself out for cash and her unwitting “lover” who may or may not be her father), genocide, rape, child pornography and child prostitution, violence, hate, boredom, lust, fear, and cowardice all in the first 19 chapters. It’s an encyclopedia in how to hurt. All of these awful events happen to these little kids, and their actions decide the fates of billions of lives.

Bokurano is about these 14 kids that get tricked into operating a giant mecha, and they must fight for the continuation of earth. Right off the bat none of the characters are likeable, all of the children have their own very adult problems. From the elder brother who routinely beats his sister which “helps him sleep”, to the child who fell in love with her teacher, let him videotape them having sex, then got blackmailed by the teacher into a prostitution ring. It begs the question, “If I hate all these characters, why should I read this manga?”. Well if you’re a masochist, you’ll be fapfapfapping all the way to the bank, but beneath all the human drama there lies a warm nougat-y philosophical center.

Most of Bokurano is divided into two sections;The Human Drama and The Subjective Drama. The Human Drama takes place off of the battlefield. The characters that can’t get past the insecurities bestowed on them by society are the characters that break down in the cockpit of the “Zearth”. Love, Lust, Hate, and Fear are all parts of what make us human. Many times we wonder what defines a human. Is it a soul? Is it blood? Is it the ability to question what we’re told, and decide what we think about anything? No one can answer for sure, but Bokurano poses the thought that humans are defined by their ability to take other lives and use them to support their own. Are we defined by our ability to define weaker beings lives?

Spoilers ahead beware!

One of the great twists to the Bokurano manga is that these kids aren’t fighting weird evil aliens, or nazi motherfuckers. They are fighting themselves, but in parallel universes. If our heroes don’t win every battle their universe is annihilated out of existence and the epic war continues. Its hard to imagine the universe we exist in not being there anymore. If the humanity we know ceases to be does all existence cease to be? So the kids trudge on in hopes of saving their universe, but even as they do so they wonder why? Why save the universe that produces the pain they have felt their whole lives.

The Subjective Drama is where these kids check their morals and their ethics and decide is it worth it to continue to live, let alone save these people. Some of them can’t handle it, and one has a psychotic breakdown. Wherein he refuses to fight, so another one of the kids cuts his throat and commandeers the mecha. To me this is an outstanding portrayal of the duality of man. Some men will show extreme cowardice in great situations, but some will pick up the knife and trudge onward to save humanity. This also begs the question “What right do you have to take another persons life?” but thats a question I will be discussing on the Gundam Post.

I guess in the long run I have no answers to anything in this post, consider this me thinking out loud and on a wordpress. All in all Bokurano is an interesting if depressing manga. I’m told the anime sucks, so I doubt I will revisit it on the blog, but who knows maybe I’ll do a top 10 mindfuck manga list or something.