If you want the option to pack maximum tear-inducing misery in a story , the teenage years of someone born in Japan around 1933 is a pretty good setting. Poverty, starvation, ruins, gangs of orphan children, shell-shocked homeless soldiers, the awareness you were raised in a world of lies...
edit: I (...don't...) recommend looking up a manga named Cocoon. It's a historically informed story about a class of schoolgirls during the Battle of Okinawa IIRC, slightly yuri and really fucking depressing.
last edited at Aug 6, 2021 1:27PM