Such a quietly devastating graphic novel based on the true story of the Himeyuri student nurses in WWII Okinawa. San and her classmates are recruited as assistant nurses and sent to the front lines, where they witness horrors no one that age should ever see.

The themes here are beautifully handled. Kyo builds the entire story around the idea of a cocoon with protection, girlhood, the desperate desire to shield yourself from something too big to survive. San wishes she could wrap herself and her friends in an invisible cocoon of safety, but those threads are no match for the carnage around them. After reading the author's note I found that the names themselves are part of the symbolism with San meaning silkworm and Mayu meaning cocoon in Japanese — adding a whole extra layer that impressed me.

The art is also something I kept coming back to. It has this loose, almost unfinished quality that makes the story feel deeply personal and dreamlike. Kyo disguises blood and death as flowers which took me some time to realise. It's startling but it clicks and works. The delicate, soft visuals make the brutality of war feel even more grotesque. The white space doesn't hide what's unsightly, it forces you to see it. The ending, while abrupt for some, lands with a quiet and bittersweet weight.

What didn't work for me was - the art style, while creative and symbolic, also confused me at times. I appreciate what Kyo was doing by using ambiguity to mirror the disorientation of war, but I did find myself occasionally struggling to follow what was happening. Some action scenes were hard to read, and the characters sometimes looked similar enough that I had to pause and remind myself who was who. It's a deliberate choice, but it did affect my immersion.

Also, this surprised me, but it didn't move me as much as I expected it to. I'm someone who cries easily at books, and this is objectively a tragic story. But something about the emotional distance, that "dreamlike" quality the author mentions in her note, kept me at arm's length. I felt sad, yes, but I wasn't devastated the way I thought I would be. It's a quiet, restrained sadness which fits the story, but I wanted to feel more.

Cocoon is a respectful, careful, and heartbreaking chronicle of loss and resilience. It doesn't or preach. It simply shows us young girls, barely more than children, thrust into caves turned slaughterhouses, wiping blood from their hands while their friends die around them. It's not the most emotionally overwhelming war story I've read (and wanted it to be), but it lingers for some time. If you're looking for something that captures the quiet horror of war through the eyes of the young, this is worth your time.