It’s a bit bittersweet to reach the end of Okinawa, our very first manga translated and published here on Substack, with the aid of all of our subscribers making it a reality. This book had a bumpy road to publication, but with the last chapter digitally published in English today, we’ve hit a very major milestone. Thank you to everyone reading, and of course our production crew Jocelyne, Patrick, and Andrew, our colleagues in Japan Mitsuhiro Asakawa and Aki Yanagi, numerous friends who have helped along the way, and of course Higa-sensei himself for creating this wonderful work. We promise to pass along any messages/comments left here, or sent to us at mangasplaining@gmail.com, to Higa-sensei. :)
The complete Okinawa by Susumu Higa is schedule to be published in print by Fantagraphics in spring/summer 2023, and it will include some additional material as well, including a new introduction, materials from the book collections, and some rarities. We’ll be sharing those here as ‘bonus’ posts as they are completed. Which is to say, we’ll have more to say about Okinawa, our edition of Susumu Higa’s Sword of Sand and Mabui, in coming weeks. In fact we’ve included Higa-sensei’s afterword to Mabui this week, after the last manga page. We hope you enjoy it, and you’ll keep reading for more. :)
Finally, I didn’t want it to go unobserved that this last chapter of Mabui, entitled, of course, Mabui, recapitulates many of the themes of the book into a story of Okinawa’s past, that could just-as-well be Okinawa’s future. Think of it as an echo of the stories already told: A man is haunted by dead spirits; gambling and violence destroy everything they touch; greed begets seemingly divine punishment; disturbing visions; a Yuta attempts to set things right in both the spiritual and physical realms. Much like Higa-sensei’s first book Sword of Sand flashed forwards in time in the last chapter, in Mabui we get a flash back, to show us where we’ve come from.
There’s still a long way to go.
Christopher Woodrow-Butcher
This chapter of Okinawa is the longest yet, at 42 pages. We strongly recommend viewing it on our website, or in the Substack app. PDF and CBZ files are at the end of this message, after the paywall. Our sincere thanks to our paying subscribers! You can view all of our published manga to date on our Manga Guide page!
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