Town of Evening Calm: The Contest

Over at Shuchaku East, precocious blogger Chloe Ferguson is celebrating her blog’s one-year anniversary with a terrific contest. One lucky winner will receive a copy of Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms, a beautiful manga that made many blogger’s Best of 2007 lists (including our Best Manga list). To enter, send Chloe your name and address by Thursday, January 10th at midnight (EST). The winner will be chosen at random from the entries.

Want to know more about Town of Evening Calm? David Welsh has compiled links to and quotes from reviews around the blogsphere, from Otaku USA to Jog the Blog. Though David has been generous in sharing the spotlight with other reviewers in his efforts to promote this wonderful book, I’m going to let him have the last word on why you ought to read Town of Evening Calm:

The incalculable individual cost of the bombing of Hiroshima has been handled in drama and documentary, and one can’t argue that the act of examining that kind of horror is automatically a virtuous or courageous act. The critical element is any given work’s ability to move its audience.

To personalize a tragedy of this magnitude is to risk trivializing the event or populating it with characters more philosophically functional than emotionally specific. Kouno avoids these failings entirely. There’s richness and realness to her cast and generosity to her storytelling that lets readers inhabit the world instead of simply observing or commenting on it. It’s a perfect blend of the painfully real and the creatively effective.

So, you should buy this book, because it’s good in every way that matters. Reading it will give you genuine pleasure, and that pleasure will only be enhanced by the worthiness of the subject matter and Kouno’s intelligence and sensitivity in dramatizing it.

And if you don’t win that copy that Chloe is giving away at Shuchaku East, you shouldn’t have trouble tracking it down at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or Last Gasp, the publisher.