Why The Sky Is Blue

The work of a visionary and iconoclastic feminist cartoonist—available in English for the first time The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud collects the best short stories from Kuniko Tsurita’s remarkable career. While the works of her male peers in literary manga are widely reprinted, this formally ambitious and poetic female voice is like none other currently available to an English readership. A master of the comics form, expert pacing and compositions combined with bold characters are signature qualities of Tsurita's work. Tsurita’s early stories “Nonsense” and “Anti” provide a unique, intimate perspective on the bohemian culture and political heat of late 1960s and early ‘70s Tokyo. Her work gradually became darker and more surreal under the influence of modern French literature and her own prematurely failing health. As in works like “The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud” and “Max,” the gender of many of Tsurita's strong and sensual protagonists is ambiguous, marking an early exploration of gender fluidity. Late stories like "Arctic Cold" and "Flight" show the artist experimenting with more conventional narrative modes, though with dystopian themes that extend the philosophical interests of her early work. An exciting and essential gekiga collection, The Sky is Blue with a Single Cloud is translated by the comics scholar Ryan Holmberg and includes an afterword cowritten by Holmberg and manga editor Mitsuhiro Asakawa delineating Tsurita's importance and historical relevance.

Thoughts of a physicist and nobel laureate from India.

Delightful and intriguing, 'Why the Sky is Blue' shows how the attempt to answer this age-old and deceptively simple question only enhances the magic of the blue sky we see above us.

Although he wants to learn all that wise old Donkey knows, Rabbit cannot sit still to listen to the answers to his questions, but in the end he teaches Donkey some new things.

Answers scientific questions inspired by the outdoors, including "why does it smell so fresh after it rains?", "why do dandelions turn white and fluffy?", and "what's that white line in the sky?"

"Introduces readers to the science behind the sky, [examining] the makeup of the atmosphere and the different wavelengths of light"--

A description in simple terms of the atmosphere, molecules, and why the sky is blue.