Are we just not going to talk about this, or....?

Nobody ever wants to talk about taboo. That’s exactly why it’s taboo. Tatsumi’s works presented in this collection are frequented with depictions of complex and often-unspoken truths about sexuality, and I think that it is extremely important that we speak about them if we’re going to go by the historical route when discussing this manga as we've done thus far.

I think it is quite clear to us by now that many of these short stories –most notably Hell and Good-bye—have in them a biting political edge. We understand from Hell the devastating effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, and from Good-bye, the intensely problematic reliance of Japanese women (sex workers) on American GI’s during US occupation. What’s not really been touched upon is how foot fetishism, incest, cross-dressing, and general sexual perversion fits in to the narrativization of Japan’s coming-to-terms with its own atrocities in the post-war period.

                 While the horrors of the Holocaust are universally cited as perhaps the greatest atrocity of World War Two, there’s often little mention of the fact that the Japanese Imperial forces committed some 3-10 million-plus murders between 1937 and 1945 (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP3.HTM). The “Rape of Nanking” and human torture/experimentation in prison camps like Unit 731 (proceed at your own risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731) are among the most notable of these atrocities. I believe Tatsumi’s attempts to describe the painful acknowledgement of these facts on a national scale can be found in his depiction of sexual deviancy and its internal/external repercussions within his works.

This is best approached in relation to the scenes in Sky Burial in which Nogawa speaks with the police interrogator and his next-door neighbor. After the body of a dead man is found to have been rotting in the room next to Nogawa for 3 months, he’s asked by a detective of some sorts, “How could you not notice the stench?,” to which Nogawa replies: “Trust me, sir… I had no idea someone was dead” (78). Earlier in the manga, he’s depicted running from a vulture; immediately after the interrogation, he’s found escaping the birds in a dive bar; after that, he runs into his neighbor, who tells Nogawa he’s leaving because he’s “too creeped out by the idea of living next to a corpse for three months” (81). When put in concert with Tatsumi’s unnerving depictions of incest taboo and fetishism –which all societies seldom speak about because of their "repulsive" nature (indeed, in Woman in the Mirror, Tesuji vomits when he see Ikeuchi in drag)—the texts and actions in Sky Burial show us the reality of the hardship Japan faced in the aftermath of WWII as it slowly came to acknowledge its own wrongdoings. Shame for these perversions are seen in many of Tatsumi’s stories: Ikeuchi allegedly burns his house down; Mr. Yamano of Click, Click, Click wishes to die because his otherwise-perfect life is “meaningless.” All together, I think this taboo and the way we react to it helps to understand the deep remorse and hopelessness Japan experienced in the outcome of the Second World War when reflecting on/trying to forget its actions.