On Kentaro Miura and Unfinished Stories
Today I woke up to learn that Kentaro Miura, the creator, writer and artist of the long-running manga series Berserk, has died from an aortic dissection. This is, understandably, shocking news. Miura was only 54, younger than contemporaries like Hirohiko Araki and George Morikawa. He died leaving his magnum opus unfinished, incomplete. We will never know how the story ends.
I am a great admirer of Miura’s artistry and what I’ve managed to read of Berserk has been incredible, but I must confess I’ve never really sat down and gone through the whole journey. This is a shame, because Berserk is considered one of the greatest manga ever written. And now it can never end, at least, not in the way Miura wanted it to.
It got me thinking about unfinished stories. Every author someday dies. I will someday die. Many authors will tell you the same thing – we have ten lifetimes of stories in us, so many ideas and such finite time in which to express them. There are stories that will never be told because the bodies and brains that produce them simply cease to be.
Being an author is walking the tightrope of mortality and death, starting projects not knowing if you’ll ever finish them. I could die today, and you’d never know how the things I’m writing were going to end. And that’s terrifying. There will, always, be writers who don’t get to tell the stories they need to tell. That’s the price of immortality.
Terry Pratchett died from Alzheimer’s disease in March 2015, having suffered significant cognitive decline in the years leading up to his death. He lost his ability to write almost completely, and his last few books were dictated rather than typed. The final Discworld novel does not end with the tying up of things. It simply ends. The Discworld still goes on existing, somewhere out there in space, but we don’t get to know what happens in those stories. They are closed off to us.
Thus also goeth Berserk.
There is no great writing lesson to be learned from this. This is not a cautionary tale, nor an admonishment of Miura for not working faster, and I wouldn’t dream of doing that. Not to him, not to his family, not to his fans. We all work as hard as we can. And he worked hard.
No, this is just an observation about the fragility of life and of creative work. There comes a time when ideas die with their authors. The death of an artist is the death of a little world that we are fortunate, if briefly, to be made privy to. We should all be grateful for that.
Take care of yourselves today. Keep moving forward. Keep on making good things. Continue to struggle for the heights. It’s all we can do in the treacherous journey that is this life, so long and so short at the same time.
Rest in peace, Miura-sensei.