Witnesstheabsurd

Tribute to Kentaro Miura

Added 2021-05-26 23:09:13 +0000 UTC

I actually took a little bit to upload this here despite having put it elsewhere - specifically because when I upload work here I often feel that the opportunity is there to write something a little more substantial than just the title or a short phrase, and i've had trouble considering how best to summarize some of my feelings about Miura.

Kentaro Miura, the author of Berserk, a long running and extremely influential manga, passed away recently (as you might be aware). Berserk is... complicated. It's always been a work that transcends the normal templates of it's genre (Expanding and redefining them in the process) and even putting Miura's Dore-esque draughtsmanship aside, has produced some of the most enduring and personally resonant writing in the medium, but it's also a flawed work that uses extremely brutal or appalling subject matter as a blunt cudgel with little grace as much as it uses it sensitively. In equal measures Berserk has both elevated and lowered itself at times.

The reality is though that for me, Berserk has been a formative and deeply precious experience. I can't pretend to have an insight into Miura as a person or to understand much of him beyond his work - but I know his work deserved the love and the critique and the emotion of all kinds that it invoked. When I heard about his passing I cried, and I think I am still crying, in some form.

The wandering skeletal knight that pulls Guts from the jaws of the eclipse tells him that to struggle and "rise again" is "The only sword a struggler can use against death". We should all be bold enough to rise again, and struggle onwards.