Is Showa: A History of Japan Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Showa: A History of Japan is Shigeru Mizuki's attempt to put his own life inside the larger story of twentieth-century Japan. Published in four thick English volumes by Drawn & Quarterly, it covers 1926 to 1989 — the entire Showa era — through a mix of straightforward historical narration, satirical asides, and Mizuki's own memories as a soldier who survived combat in Papua New Guinea and lost an arm to an Allied bombing raid. It's not quite a memoir and not quite a textbook. It's both, stitched together by one cartoonist who wanted readers to understand how his country ended up at war, and what that war actually cost the people living through it.

What it does well

The strongest thing Mizuki does here is refuse to let the history stay abstract. Most of each volume is narrated history — the rise of the military government, the invasion of Manchuria, the propaganda campaigns that primed ordinary people to accept war — but every so often the book drops into a ground-level view through a recurring stand-in character and, later, Mizuki's own direct account of his service. You get the policy decisions from above and the lived consequences from below in the same book, which is rare. When he finally reaches his own deployment, the shift is stark: the research-heavy documentary style gives way to something rawer and more personal, and it's the best stretch in the whole series.

Mizuki also doesn't write this as a patriotic account or a simple tragedy. He's blunt about the military leadership's incompetence, the home front's starvation, and the lies the public was fed at every stage. The art backs this up with a deliberate split: photo-referenced, heavily detailed backgrounds for the historical sections, and his looser, rounder cartoon figures for the human moments — so you're never confused about whether you're looking at "history" or "a person's life" on a given page, even though the book is constantly moving between the two.

Where it falls short

The tradeoff for all that ambition is density. The earliest chapters, before Mizuki's own story takes over, are mostly narration boxes stacked over illustrated scenes — informative, but closer to an illustrated lecture than a comic with scenes and dialogue. If you're hoping for something that reads fast, this isn't it, and the sheer number of real historical names and dates can blur together without at least a rough sense of the period going in.

There's also a tonal whiplash that some readers won't vibe with. Mizuki can't fully put down his cartoonist instincts, and odd comic touches — a goofy aside, a bit of folklore — show up close to scenes of famine or soldiers dying of disease. It's intentional (Mizuki uses the same instinct in his yokai work to make hard truths easier to sit with), but it can read as tone-deaf if you're not expecting it.

Verdict

There isn't much else like Showa on a comics shelf — a cartoonist spending four volumes and his own body count to explain how his country talked itself into disaster and then dug out of it. It asks for patience, especially up front, but the payoff is a document you won't get from a straight history book or a straight memoir alone.