ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the representation of Aum and the URA through the popular medium of manga. It demonstrates the way the work of two major artists working today, Yamamoto Naoki (b. 1960) and Urasawa Naoki (b. 1960), processes the gas attacks through the URA event, complicating the narration of Japan’s recent past in these works. Utilizing the effects of trauma on the narration of history as a guiding framework, this chapter analyzes Yamamoto’s attempt in his post-Aum work Believers (Biriibaazu, 1999) to find meaning for the gas attacks through the URA event and the artist’s attempt in his subsequent series Red (Reddo, 2006–) to assimilate the URA incident into the linear dimensions of the dominant history. In contrast to Yamamoto’s work, the disorienting experience of Urasawa Naoki’s 20th Century Boys (Nijūseiki shōnen, 1999–2006), this chapter argues, depicts the radicalism of the 1970s as a historical moment that has been left largely unprocessed in the Japanese cultural imaginary. 20th Century Boys reveals the divide between the way the past is represented in normative history and the way it is experienced in the popular imagination of the Heisei period.
