Cocoon

Synopsis

A heart-wrenching chronicle of loss and resilience based on the true story of the Himeyuri corps of student nurses in WWII. San and her best friend Mayu attend a boarding school for girls in Okinawa, but their studies are interrupted when they and the other students are recruited to help the war effort as assistant nurses. Sent to the front lines, the girls must deal with more than just the threat of enemy bombs overhead. Stuck working in the horrifying caves of a field hospital, San wishes she could wrap herself and her friends in a cocoon of protection. But invisible threads of affection are no match for the carnage that surrounds them, and day by day, more students perish. Worn down by starvation and loss, what will San and her remaining friends do when they are told to find their way home through the fields of total war? (Source: VIZ Media)

“This is a story about war, set in a vague place and time, depicted through the medium of a dream” Who better to describe it than the author. This dreamlike quality she’s talking about is not an offhand remark. There is a pervasive uncanniness through which we see the mutilation and the disease and the hunger, it is not simply that our p.o.v. is that of a teenager; a strange separation is felt between matters of war and matters of girlhood. This, you will first deduce, is how the image of the titular cocoon is invoked, through a deliberate denial and attempt to escapereality. While this is true, to reduce it to just that would be disservice to her intentionality. After all, a cocoon is simply one stage of a cycle. Machiko Kyou is a fantastic artist. The casualness of her signature style of minimal dialogue and drawing is not there to minimize the brutality, the white space doesn’t hide what is unsightly, it takes our possibility to see anything but. The inner monologue of our main character is lucid, aware of the dwindling of life around her, and yet, between the butchery, she’s never let to forget that every face she sees burn is one of a callow school girl, now forever to be frozen on fantasy, memory, or as she would say, dream. A dream of girlhood cocooned inside a war. These are the two main motifs of the story, the stagnant dream and the forceful cycle. To hatch is to change, and to leave. Both are interlinked. The staging of war forces the cycle to move forward, as the dream of girlhood is what may spin the cocoon together and allow larvae to live.