russtaglibro

Barefoot Gen coincidence: The Comics Journal interview
gen

Weird! I just finished reading issue 252 of The Comics Journal and in the last page I had a shock of cognitive dissonance as I saw art from Barefoot Gen (which I spent the last few days reading), as part of an ad for a later TCJ issue that would have an interview with Nakazawa. I found an interview excerpt at the TCJ website: http://tcj.com/256/i_nakazawa.html I'll have to hunt down this issue. (The ad says issue 255, but the tcj website says issue 256... apparently things got pushed back an issue.) Synchronicity strikes again!

(Issue 252 was pretty interesting as usual, by the way. A 5-page article about Italian comics made me wish I could read Italian. (God, I'm becoming a language geek... I actually started looking at an online German course this evening, but that's another story.) There was a short article about Japanese comic artist Moto Hagio who sounds pretty interesting, also. And various other nifty stuff. I always enjoy TCJ.)

Anyway, I have noticed that Keiji seems a more common spelling than Keizi for the name of the author of Barefoot Gen. I googled for Nakazawa Keizi and found that most of the sites that spell it that way seem to be Esperanto. I know very little about Japanese or writing Japanese names in roman letters. Apparently j and z can both be used for the same sound...? E.g. in the ad, Gen is crying "Shinji!", which is written "Sinzi!" in the Esperanto version. Also it seems s and sh can represent the same sound (I also noticed the Esperanto version says Hirosima instead of Hiroshima). (And google shows lots of sites spelling it Hirosima, not just Esperanto sites.) Finally, I was not actually sure what Daikiti meant in the Esperanto version - it sounds like an untranslated Japanese word or name. Based on the English version saying "Papa", I'd have expected "Paĉjo" in the Esperanto.

I know some people who are into Japanese, so I guess I'll find out if any of them can shed light on this little linguistic mystery. :)