LAST GASP

The year is 1953. Now an apprentice sign painter, Gen has become a skilled artist, while his friends run a thriving dressmaking business. Gen falls in love for the first time, but fails to notice that a good friend has been caught in the clutches of drug addiction. Heartbreak and loss await Gen as the atomic bomb continues to wreak havoc on the lives of people in Hiroshima years after the fact. Yet these tragedies also inspire Gen to make the big move to Tokyo to pursue his career as an artist.

This second volume, The Day After, tells the story of the day after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima as seen through the eyes of seven-year-old Gen Nakaoka. Gen, his mother, and his newborn sister face the horrors of the day after the bomb.

Nine days after the bomb, Gen and his mother continue to struggle for food, shelter and water amid chaos and vast human suffering. Though confronted with the most despicable aspects of humankind, Gen acts with love and compassion.

The story of life in Hiroshima after the atomic bomb continues! Gen fights against a corrupt medical system, the discriminatory practices of his neighbors, and the American presence in Postwar Japan. Gen's brother, Koji, has gone away to work in the coal mines but has since disappeared. To make up for the shortage, he and his friends must resort to more drastic measures - which lands one of the bunch in a juvenile detention center.

An impoverished but talented artist takes Gen under his wing and teaches him to paint. Inspired by the artist's assertion that art has no borders, Gen vows to become an artist himself, and takes a job as apprentice to a local poster painter.

Fujio and Mitsuo, two blue-collar factory workers, dream of training in martial arts overseas and becoming famous. When they accidentally kill their overbearing boss, they bury him at a man-made garbage mountain contaminated with industrial waste and which, naturally, transforms the bodies of the dead into ravenous, flesh-eating zombies! Fujio and Mitsuo try their best to survive, but the hapless pair become separated after an idiotic mistake involving potato chips and a stray dog.