A manga adaptation of a Nobel winner's book on the experiences of women who served in the Soviet Union's campaign against Germany in World War II is proving a timely success among Japanese readers looking to better understand war amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The comic series is based on and shares its name with the Japanese title for Nobel Prize in literature winner Svetlana Alexievich's 1985 nonfiction book "The Unwomanly Face of War." She interviewed over 500 women to tell their frontline stories, and the manga carefully recounts them to challenge perceptions of war.
Many stories have been told in Japan of women's home front experiences, but the book renders in careful, panel-by-panel detail the lives of women on the front line to provide a multifaceted sense of war's reality.