Keiji Nakazawa

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Keiji Nakazawa (中沢啓治 Nakazawa Keiji) (born 1939) is a Japanese manga artist and writer.

He was born in Hiroshima, and was in the city when it was destroyed by a nuclear weapon in 1945. All of his family members who had not been evacuated died in the bombing, except for his mother.

In 1961, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo to become a full-time cartoonist, and produced short pieces for manga anthologies such as Shonen Gaho, Shonen King, and Bokura.

In 1966, following the death of his mother, Nakazawa returned to his memories of the destruction of Hiroshima and began to express them in his stories. Kuroi Ame ni Utarete (Struck by Black Rain), the first of a series of five books, was a fictional story of Hiroshima survivors involved in the postwar black market. In 1972, Nakazawa chose to portray his own experience directly in the story "Ore wa Mita" ("I Saw It"), published in Monthly Shonen Jump.

Immediately after finishing "I Saw It", Nakazawa began his major work, Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen). This series, which eventually filled ten volumes (four volumes in English translation), was based on the same events as "I Saw It" but fictionalized, with the young Gen as a stand-in for the author. Barefoot Gen depicted the bombing and its aftermath in graphic detail, but also turned a critical eye on the militarization of Japanese society in the World War II years, and on the sometimes abusive dynamics of the traditional family.