Special: Nausicaä — Part 2: The Manga That Destroys the Film's Paradise

This is Part 2 of 2. ← Read Part 1: The Messiah in Blue

Photo: Jōmon Sugi cedar, Yakushima — the oldest known living tree in Japan, estimated at 2,000–7,000 years old. In the manga’s world-view, living things of this age are not background: they are testimony. Photo by Yosemite / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons

Miyazaki drew the Nausicaä manga for Tokuma Shoten’s Animage magazine between February 4, 1982 and March 1994. The seventh and final tankōbon volume was published on January 15, 1995. The complete work runs around 1,060 pages, across sixty chapters, broken by long interruptions because Miyazaki was directing Laputa (1986), Totoro (1988), Kiki (1989), Porco Rosso (1992), and Mononoke (which would begin after the manga closed) in parallel. The manga is the longest work of his career. And it is the only one in which he had time, in the same medium, to rewrite his own conclusion.[7]

The origin of the work is, in itself, counterintuitive. In 1980, Miyazaki had been trying to push film projects after the relative commercial failure of The Castle of Cagliostro (1979). His proposals were rejected in sequence. Hideo Ogata, editor-in-chief of Animage, and Yasuyoshi Tokuma proposed a side path: do the manga first, we will publish monthly, and if it becomes popular we will make the film. Miyazaki agreed, on one condition: no anime adaptation. He drew the manga, as he would later declare, to express things animation could not carry.

That was the formal reason. The real one was that he wanted narrative space at scale. Animation chains the author to the production calendar, to the budget, to the two-hour limit. The manga does not chain. The manga lets the author think.

In an interview with Yom magazine in June 1994, three months after closing the last chapter, Miyazaki said: “After the film, I told myself I was going to handle the issue more seriously in the manga. But once I started, there were so many things I did not understand. From beginning to end, I ended up writing with a lot of things I did not understand.”[8]

It is the most honest sentence he has ever given about his own work. And it is the exact point where the manga and the film stop being two versions of the same story.

The manga quickly became Animage’s most popular feature, but Miyazaki tried to abandon it several times across the twelve years. In a 1995 interview with Ryo Saitani, he mentions conversations with Ogata in which he asked to stop, and the editor convinced him to continue. The interruptions are visible in the work’s rhythm. Volume 1 is serialized between 1982 and 1983. A hiatus during the production of Laputa in 1985-86. Volume 2 closes in 1986. A pause during Totoro and Kiki between 1987 and 1989. Volume 4 only comes out in 1991, the year of the Japanese asset bubble’s collapse. The writing of the ending, from volume 5 to 7, runs through exactly the period in which Japan was understanding that the golden decade was over.[9]

This matters for reading the manga. Miyazaki is drawing the collapse of an industrial civilization while the industrial civilization around him is dismantling, in slow motion, the consensus of 1985.

The graphic style also separates the manga from nearly all commercial Japanese manga. Miyazaki draws in pencil, without ink, on large paper, in dense panels where the background eats the foreground. The critic Kentarō Takekuma observed that, especially in the early chapters, it is hard to distinguish characters from setting without paying attention. The standard manga reader, trained on clean lines and clear visual separation, has to slow down. The manga is physically slow to read, unlike the film, which is kinetic.[10]

The first two volumes correspond, with adaptations, to the film. From volume three on, the world expands in a way that would never fit in two hours of cinema. Tolmekia and Dorok appear as full civilizations, with religion, politics, geography, collective neurosis. Kushana is given a biography: a mother driven mad by poison at court, rival brothers, family tragedy. Kurotowa, the cynical officer who is a footnote in the film, becomes one of the most intelligent characters in the manga, cynical in the Greek sense of the term, capable of ambiguous loyalty to Kushana because he understands court politics better than she does. Yupa carries the wisdom of someone who has seen too much. Asbel and Selm fill in around Nausicaä so that she stops being the only moral axis of the work.

She is still the central character. But she learns, across the seven volumes, that no truth belongs to one person alone. And that the problem of her world is not violence. It is the idea that someone always believes they have the right to decide who should live.

The Fukai Was Never a Curse. It Was a Design.

The great revelation arrives in volume seven, at the Shuwa no Bosho (シュワの墓所, “the Crypt of Shuwa”). The reader discovers that the Fukai is not an environmental curse. It is a biotechnological filter. The fungi, the spores, the Ohmu, all of it is part of an artificial system designed by the previous civilization to purify the Earth over thousands of years.

This alone would already be turn enough for most fiction. Miyazaki turns again.

The humans of Nausicaä’s world, including her, are not humans in the pre-apocalyptic sense. They were genetically edited to breathe the current poisoned air. They belong to the wounded Earth. When the Earth finishes purifying itself, the previous air will return. They will not be able to breathe in it.

The announced paradise, therefore, was not made for them.

The Shuwa no Bosho holds the rest: embryos of a “correct” humanity, preserved in stasis by the ancients, planned to wake when the air is clean enough. The current living (Nausicaä, her people, the Dorok, the Tolmekians, all of them) are a transitional stage. They exist to cross the contaminated time. They are, in the previous civilization’s plan, disposable with a scheduled date.

Here Miyazaki delivers the blow that separates the manga from nearly all Western ecological fiction. The plan is technically coherent. Save the Earth. Restore the air. Preserve a clean humanity. Eliminate the poison. Seen from outside, it is virtuous. Seen from inside, it is extermination in the language of gardening.

There is a historical reference the Japanese reader of 1994 understands without needing explanation. The plan of the ancients is the mental structure of any twentieth-century utopian project that bought the idea of purifying in order to save. Take out the name “ancients” and replace it with modern social engineering, eugenics, population planning, environmental fundamentalism. The form is the same. Who is left off the paradise spreadsheet?

Nausicaä understands. She refuses. She destroys the Shuwa no Bosho.

The decision is Miyazaki’s hardest authorial gesture. She has no plan B. No new religion. No guarantee that her people will survive. No confidence that history will judge her with mercy. She has only one thing: the refusal to accept that any future has the right to erase the life that already exists.

The Kyoshinhei of the manga is no longer the pathetic monster of the film. It receives a name (Ohma, given by Nausicaä), a childlike voice, and something close to a newly awakened consciousness that looks at its human mother before understanding what it is. There is something of a son in it. Something of a bomb that has not yet detonated and perhaps does not want to. Miyazaki does not let the reader hate it in any simple way. The monster is also the orphan of a dead civilization.

The reading that the Kyoshinhei operates, in the manga, as an image of the atomic bomb is defensible and runs through Japanese criticism from the 1990s on. Miyazaki was born in 1941. He grew up in the visual culture of the mushroom cloud as the century’s original sin. The Kyoshinhei carries that: from far away it looks like the decisive weapon, up close it burns whoever tries to use it. It does not only burn bodies. It burns morality, compassion, the capacity to see the other as life. When, in volume six, Nausicaä walks beside an Ohma already sick and in programmed decomposition, the panel does not ask for compassion for the weapon. It asks the reader to see that every absolute weapon is also an orphan.

The Offer, the Refusal, and the Sentence Against Every Utopia

When Nausicaä enters the Shuwa no Bosho beside the Ohma, in volume seven, the scene feels less like a manga fight and more like Adagio for Strings in slow motion. The master of the crypt, in holographic form representing the wills of the ancients, makes the offer: accept the plan. Preserve the archive. Allow the purified Earth to receive those who were prepared for it. The offer is rational. It is beautiful. It has moral cover.

Nausicaä refuses in a single sentence, translated in the VIZ Media edition as: “Suffering and tragedy and folly will not disappear in a purified world. They are part of humanity.”[11]

It is not a sentence of ecological fantasy. It is a sentence against every modern utopia.

In the film, Nausicaä saves because she sacrifices herself. In the manga, she saves because she accepts carrying a guilt. The two positions are not comparable. The first is redemption fantasy. The second is ethics without guarantee.

This is also where the manga stops being ecological fable and turns into something much larger. Miyazaki is talking about twentieth-century humanity. About soulless science. About the bomb. About the bureaucratic temptation to build perfect systems by sacrificing real people. About the arrogance of those who look at the future as a spreadsheet and forget that life never fit in a spreadsheet.

The manga’s question is not how to save the world. It is who is left outside the saved world.

Nausicaä understands that the answer is unbearable. She refuses the paradise of the ancients. She refuses the purified humanity. She refuses the future planned by the dead. She refuses the salvation that requires disposal.

There is no final wedding. There is no restored kingdom. There is no villain cleanly defeated. There is no music announcing that it ended well. There is a girl before the weight of the world, and she chooses to continue. Even without heaven. Even inside hell. Even without guarantee.

In 1994, the year the manga’s last chapter came out, the work received the Japan Cartoonists Association Award Grand Prize (大賞), given by a panel of working cartoonists. It is peer recognition, not public recognition. Miyazaki’s colleagues understood that what he had done in the manga was different from what he had done in the film, and they awarded the manga. The film had already won its prizes in 1984. The manga had to win its own.[12]

Princess Mononoke, directed three years later, in 1997, is Miyazaki’s attempt to take to cinema part of what he had understood in the manga. Moro, the gigantic wolf, does what the Ohmu would do in the manga: kill not out of malice, and be admired anyway. San and Ashitaka receive no messianism, only continuation. Some say Mononoke is the spiritual sequel to the Nausicaä manga. Technically, it is more than that. It is Miyazaki trying, in the same cinematic format that had offered consolation in 1984, to refuse the consolation he himself had made.

Photo: Shiratani Unsuikyo gorge, Yakushima — forest, water and rock in uninterrupted coexistence. The ecology the manga defends is not a paradise to be restored; it is a process, ongoing, wounded, and irreplaceable. Photo by Yosemite / CC BY-SA 3.0 / Wikimedia Commons

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This is Part 2 of 2. ← Back to Part 1: The Messiah in Blue