I noticed that in the beginning of 2022, Daisuke Nishijima’s manga series “The Witch and the End of the World” was completed. I purchased Book 1 in 2005 and was fascinated by the book. Book 2 appeared in 2006, and later I purchased together with new Book 3 in 2009. It was succeeded by the purchase of Book 4 in 2012, and for long time after that there was no sequel. Recently I noticed that Book 5 and Book 6 appeared as the complete series and the completion was achieved in 2022. Therefore I purchased Book 5 & Book 6 and finished reading them.
The story is about science, magic, a devil San Fairy Ann (Ça ne fait rien) and a boy who is fond of science, Mugi (wheat in Japanese). The Book 1 starts with nostalgic taste. In the world described, Mugi is already dead and it is the story of Ann and “a shadow” of Mugi. “Shadow”, whose idea is described well in the final Book 6, is the main idea of this story. Mugi himself is only alive in Book 2. Even after completing the series, the idea is not vivid enough for grasping the story. Intertextuality, such as between this series and Haruki Murakami’s “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World”, is required. There are quite a lot of intertextualities, including Hayao Miyazaki’s literatures, The Rolling Stones (and unavoidably Михаи́л Афана́сьевич Булга́ков), etc. However, please not regard this series as something hard to understand. The quotes are simple with large frame divisions, enabling us to read them easily. The temporal sequence is mixed up, but it does not force us to become outcasts.
When I was a post-doc in Harvard University, I was acquainted with a Korean student who studies cultures. I let her read my collection of mangas and she was most interested in “The Witch and the End of the World” (Book 1) and “Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights” by Moto Hagio. She understood Japanese quite well and read the literatures in unusual pace. Immediately before I left Harvard, I gave her the manga collections because I thought that it would be better career paths for those manga books than being belongings of a self-indulged strange guy. Furthermore, I am a Japanese and it is easy to rebuild the manga collection. I hoped they could contribute a bit for her cultural studies. Of course this act was not free of charge. She gave me two CDs, and one of which was Zehetmair Quartet’s “Schumann: String Quartets #1 & 3”. It was awarded “Gramophone Classical Music Award” as record of the year in 2003. It started my journey for listening to Thomas Zehetmair’s music. This sort of cultural communications deserves our lives very much. I don’t know what has happened to her since then (15 years ago), but hope everything goes fine.
