Among my Christmas gifts was Shuna's Journey, the new (and first) translation of Miyazaki's 1983 book. It's a comic but not really a manga -- the translator's notes introduced me to the term emonogatari. There are very few speech bubbles but lots of lines of descriptive text and speech floating over gorgeous watercolor illustrations.
I knew going in that it was sort of an alpha for a couple of his stories, but it's remarkable just how many shadows of this book lie across his entire body of work. It's not an alpha so much as it is an essence of Nausicaa, Mononoke, Laputa, and anywhere he ever used a hard-working high-endurance young female character.
I also wasn't aware that over the time it was written, which was such a period creative experimental flourishing for him, Earthsea was one of Miyazaki’s top-line inspirations. And that adapting Earthsea was one of his several big ideas for directions in which to go. And that when he couldn't get permission -- because it was the very early 1980s and he was merely the good director of a good Lupin movie -- he took everything it had helped inspire and poured it out into his own products. Such as Shura's Journey. Which has some recognizable strands of Earthsea DNA woven through his genius.
Buy this book and then read it.
