Growing Up in the Apocalypse: Identity Formation and Narrative Focalization in Yokohama kaidashi kikō

Hitoshi Ashinano’s award-winning manga Yokohama Shopping Log (Yokohama kaidashi kikō) is a unique coming-of-age story for several reasons. Its focalizing character, the immortal robot Alpha, watches a young boy named Takahiro come of age in a post-apocalyptic, climate-ravaged world where the sea levels have risen and humanity is in its twilight. Through a consideration of the images and narrative maneuvers Ashinano makes in the manga, I argue that he presents a Bildungsroman that uses ecological cataclysm to engender and offer new pathways for personal development, staging Takahiro’s development in a world and setting that ought to preclude it. Through Alpha’s focalizing of Takahiro’s life and maturation, the reader is made to reckon with two seemingly contradictory flows of time, the linear progress model of modern time and the cyclical nature of deep time, played out through the burgeoning relationship between the manga’s two main characters. By the end of the manga, the positive, teleological thrust of the Bildungsroman gives way to an ambivalent and wistful way of living through time, a poignant note in the long history of the genre that is achieved through the silent moments made possible by Ashinano’s choice of medium and fictional setting.