The Drifting Classroom - Kazuo Umezz

Kazuo Umezz started his professional career as a comic artist in the 1950s. Now aged 85, he continues working in the medium up to the present day, and is something of a personality in his native Japan. Little of his work has been published in English (although there is more to come and more if you look for French and Italian editions), but his classic 1974 serial The Drifting Classroom that made him famous is at least available in English translation and published by Viz Media in three bulky Perfect Edition hardback volumes. It's an incredible piece of work that stands as one of the all-time classics of Japanese manga.

The Drifting Classroom's themes are similar in content and style to the early works of the modern horror master Junji Ito, while from a western perspective being reminiscent of the dark horror artwork of Charles Burns. Umezz's naive cartoony artwork however is closest to style of the master Osamu Tezuka. Umezz started his career in that era and continued to work in that style, achieving similar effect to Tezuka in how the cartoony nature of the drawing is often at odds with the seriousness of the content. Here, it contrasts in a striking way with the dark horror subject that sees mainly young schoolchildren pitted against horrors and each other in a number of violent graphic situations. In some ways it even seems to enhance the disturbing and unsettling events that take place across the 2000+ pages of this fascinating tale that, like any good serialised manga series, continually finds ways to keep the story evolving and surprising with increasingly horrifying twists and turns.

Coming across like a demented horror fantasy version of Lord of the Flies, The Drifting Classroom is set in the Yamato Elementary School in Tokyo. Sho Takamatsu is a sixth grader at the school who, on one fateful day when he has a bitter argument with his mother, arrives at the school only for it to disappear in a loud explosion. Sho and the whole school discover that they have been transported into what appears to be the far future where civilisation no longer exists and the world has turned to sand. The only life left on the planet appears to be the 862 students of the school and the teachers, seemingly alone in a barren, empty wilderness.

It turns out that they aren't completely alone in this world, but what does eventually present itself and come to the surface is a continual parade of horror. Reduced in number after a homicidal lunchroom man single-handedly massacres all the adult teachers and hoardes all the food, they are then pursued by all manner of strange creatures; by a sand monster, by creatures conjured by the starving mind of one of the children, find a mummy and then endure a plague of black death.

The students prove to be remarkably resilient, even though their number declines at an alarming rate, and even prove to be resourceful enough to perform surgical operations and undertake scientific experiments. Sho and the remaining children begin to realise however that there is no way out and that with limited food and water they are not going to last long. This realisation, and the necessity of survival against each new outbreak of monsters, disease and terror, sees school kids forming their own government, setting up breakaway factions, and turning on each other with violent and murderous intent. The question almost becomes whether the food will run out or they kill each other first. Or indeed, whether they will burn the school down first.

There is possibly an allegorical side to this, an ecological message about the harm we are doing to our fellow humans and to the planet. If that's the intent, Umezz depicts the race to an apocalyptic end in the most gruesome and graphic way - or as graphic as the art style allows. School children hunt each other down, impaling little kids on spears, chopping limbs, beating, burning and delivering summary executions. The artist's strange angles and manic speed lines add to the eerie quality of the gruesome events, with the sheer scale of the carnage over the length of the whole story quite shocking. Just as ominous is the bubbling arid moonscape of a desert that extends in all directions, the earth looking like the dark innards of some vast monster. Even the roiling dark clouds also hold other kinds of terrors. 

One of the curiosities of the narrative, or one of the few elements that suggests just a glimmer of hope or light, is that it's told as if Takamatsu is speaking to his mother in the past. And although they have been separated in time by eons, there remains some kind of psychic connection that breaks through in those times of greatest need. In one or two cases Takamatsu s mother is even able to leave an important object for him from the past to find in a place just where he will need it in the future. There is evidently a premonitory side to this as well, a warning from the unknown horrors of a grim future of ecological catastrophe that awaits us all, with the suggestion that there are still steps we can take now, if not to escape it entirely, at least alleviate just how bad it is going to be. The reality could even be a lot worse that Umezz depicts it.

Reading notes: The Drifting Classroom by Kazuo Umezz. Complete in three Perfect Edition hardcover volumes by Viz Media.