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Rating: Atrocity Exhibition
"In the last years of elementary school, what was once judged as a boy with a predisposition to autism, to the amazement and joy of the parents, had integrated without difficulty into that small society that is school. For me, that place was a cage full of monkeys and pigs. I determined that place had nothing to do with me.
To integrate with what is defined as society requires a technique. Do not stand out.
But it is not enough to remain calm. This can have the opposite effect. You must be mediocre.
Be mediocrely happy. Mediocrely serious. Mediocrely stupid. Mediocrely docile. Spend your days with a faint and cowardly smile.
As a refusal of any relationship with this society, I took advantage of this technique. For someone like me, for whom nothing has meaning, this farce was not even painful."
There is much of the Child of God in this excerpt.
The Child of God is an underground manga, created by the Nishioka brothers, Satoshi and Chiaki (Kyōdai in Japanese means brothers), respectively screenwriter and illustrator, who made their way into the world of alternative comics in Japan with extreme, experimental works of great artistic caliber.
There is something that immediately jumps out in this work, hallucinated from the start and reminiscent of children's book style rather than traditional manga, with pages of pictures and very few words on the edges: the adults are almost exclusively drawn faceless, without eyes. Like an indistinct mass of insignificant and inept individuals, irrelevant, uninfluential, without emotions, awareness, or intelligence. Conversely, the children ("the young ones," to put it better) have faces, but no expressions, and manifest the absence of a soul through the cruelties they inflict on the weaker, the prey designated by the pack of tormentors, "screeching like monkeys and indifferent like pigs". The contrast between setup and content is very strong.
Indeed, if the Child of God, the unnamed son of the Black Sun (no character has a name), the protagonist of the work, is a being born as evil, what remains most shocking is the cruelty of the individuals who, from childhood and from that "little society that is school" (as mentioned above), somehow show him the way and mark the growth towards a life of solely and purely Evil, towards extreme nihilism. In the awareness of the total absence of innocence within this world. Where very few elements are saved, destined obviously to neutralization, humiliation, violation, gruesome and horrifying death.
The work is primarily visual and almost entirely without dialogue, as mentioned. The word is entirely reserved for the thoughts and reflections of the protagonist, like a voiceover, sometimes descriptive of the senseless atrocities perpetrated, sometimes simply acknowledging the ugliness of the world. Where nothing is really worth saving. Indeed, in the name of absolute nihilism and a dark vision, perfectly represented by the black sun replacing the sun of the Japanese flag. The Land of the Rising Sun thus turns black, becomes dark. Gloomy. Malignant. A simple metaphor yet one that could not be more powerful and apt.
The aftertaste that remains in the end is bitter. The sensation is negative, and multiple times during the reading you wonder if there isn’t something gratuitous in all of this. But the final answer is no, because The Child of God is unpleasant, disturbing, far from being a "pleasant" experience, yet indisputably leaves something, certainly, you can't remain indifferent in front of so much horror portrayed with such naturalness and coldness. It is a provocative work and as such is taken to the extreme as it should be.
Where the strong and fundamental biblical subtext remains, made explicit in the postscript. The parable of an unclean spirit: this is The Child of God.
A parable that admits no concessions and confronts us with a world where Evil is rooted in human nature and social dynamics, from childhood to adulthood. Consequently, a single entity can be born, be killed, and return eternally. But it is not with it that Evil will disappear.
Japanese society is certainly full of demons, but it would be reassuring to pretend not to know that what is depicted in this work recalls cyclical horrors staged from every part of the world. Oppression, power, the attraction to death and towards a charismatic leader (like Manson). The banality of Evil.
That's why this reading (which is completed in a moment) will leave you deeply disturbed. And it is in this that the value of a work of art is recognized. Particularly the most unhealthy, most chilling. Like this one.
"I decided to kill my parents. Towards them, I held no particular grudge. I had to obtain supreme freedom, given to me by absolute power and absolute relativism.
I ordered my children to kill them."
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