Mount Monmon is Crying (Manga)

also known as ゼフィルス (Zefirusu)

The semi-autobiographical short story Mount Monmon is Crying (1979) was originally published as a short story in the January 1971 issue of Monthly Shonen Jump.

What it’s about

In the Autumn of 1936, Shigeru a small elementary student in grade four is often teased and bullied at school. This is especially true in the case of a popular schoolyard game – Poplar Sumo matches, where children test the strength of the stems of leaves of the poplar tree by pulling against each other to see which one snaps first. As usual, the biggest and the strongest kids have the strongest stems, and little Shigeru is forced to compete again and again, only to lose again and again. Humiliated, Shigeru heads off to Mount Monmon, to find some new poplar stems and runs into a mysterious young man. The man tells him that he is the white snake spirit that inhabits the local snake shrine incarnate and provides Shigeru with the strongest poplar stem of them all. Now suddenly victorious in the schoolyard, Shigeru returns to the shrine to thank the snake spirit, and the two strike up an unlikely friendship.

However, after a few years, with Shigeru now attending middle school. The sounds of war can be heard even in the small village. The White Snake spirit sadly tells Shigeru that he’ll soon be going away and before long the march towards the war proves him right. The mountain forest is cut down for lumber and the strange young man is forcibly drafted and sent to the front to fight. When his remains return home in a small box for the family shrine, Shiegru is confused – wasn’t his friend the spirit of the white snake?

Shigeru meets the White Snake Spirit

This come to a boil when Shigeru hears of plans to tear down the old Snake Shrine to make way for a road. Deciding to defend it at all costs, Shigeru climbs a tree near the shrine and uses a variety of homemade defences to keep a workman from cutting it down. Despite a valiant effort, Shigeru is unable to stop the march of progress. Years later, and adult Shigeru returns to his hometown and asks his children to listen to the sound of Mount Monmon crying as land developers continue to destroy the once natural beauty.

What you should know

Mount Monmon is Crying (1979) is another of Tezuka’s works, along with Zephyrus (1971), The Godfather’s Son (1973), Paper Fortress (1974), Hungry Blues (1975), and Pornographic Pictures (1979-80) which depict various facets of Tezuka’s wartime experiences and more directly convey his anti-war themes than much of his earlier work.

In Zephyrus (1971) he explored his own love of insects during a boyhood touched by war. In The Godfather’s Son (1973), he showed the power of manga to bring two very different people together, only to have it end due to the tragic circumstances of war.  And in Mount Monmon is Crying (1979), he wistfully took a look back on how the war affected the beloved green spaces around his hometown.

Apparently, when Osamu Tezuka was a boy, he actually met a young man who called himself the Spirit of the Snake Shrine. Obviously this stuck with him and became the basis for this short story. Interestingly, perhaps given the pseudo auto-biographical nature of the story – with Shigeru clearly a stand-in for a young Osamu Tezuka himself – Tezuka never really makes it clear if this is simply the case of a deluded mind (as Shigeru‘s mother believes), of if it really is a story of the fantastic. Despite the indications that the young man is nothing but a normal young man, he does exhibit some amazing prowess and abilities. As with many stories that reflect a certain level of childhood innocence, it’s left up to the reader to really decide.

What else you should know

Given it’s publication in the Osamu Tezuka Complete Manga Works edition (MT-124), Mount Monmon is Crying (1979) may be considered part of the “Tiger Books” short-story anthology series. However, unlike some other short-story anthologies, such as  Under the Air (1968-72), Clockwork Apple (1968-73), and The Crater (1969-70), this is a very loose affiliation.

Stars Spotted:

• • Osamu Tesuka as “Shigeru”
  • Chikara Aritake as “the workman who cuts down the tree”