Mar 13, 2025
“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 pov 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 escape
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reality. 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 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 dream of 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 (leave where?). Both will be the weight that is hurled at her with violence and disregard. Both are interlinked, the dream of war forces the cycle to move foward, as the dream of girlhood is what may spin the cocoon together and allow larvae to live (which larvae?).
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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