MANGA MANIA: BLACK JACK by Osamu Tezuka

Black Jack is the manga series from the creator of Astro Boy that is most popular among adult readers.

I don't know what that really means. These stories of a mysterious surgeon, a young man whose hair is part white and part black and whose faces is marked by a diagonally stitched scar, are perhaps somewhat more sophisticated than some of Tezuka's other work, but there is nothing particularly adult about them. Black Jack is an unlicensed surgeon who charges outrageously high fees and insists on working alone in the operating room. He accomplishes the seemingly impossible, and he is not above a certain level of deception. In this first volume we get his back story -- he own hopelessly shattered body was saved by a remarkable surgeon. We also learn that the one true love of his life has been forced to live her life as a man since he removed her womb when she had cervical cancer. These stories were written in the 1970's, so that bit of biological determinism is completely indefensible as a sign of its times. Jack's assistant is a little girl with the mind of a young woman. She was a vestigial twin rescued from the body of an 18 year old. She is also quite irritating.

MANGA MANIA: APOLLO'S SONG by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka published this in 1970, shortly after Japan authorized sex education for teenagers. Much of what seems peculiar about the story today was therefore taboo-busting when it originally came out. In the prologue, 500 million anthropomorphic sperm race for a single egg, personified as a queen in a diaphanous gown. (Try to read this without thinking of Woody Allen.) The single winner loses his tail and disappears with the queen into the womb to create an embryo, defined by Tezuka as "...the mark of love, truth, and sincerity between man and woman, male and female."

This arch tone makes the occasional reappearance in the next 500 pages, but the story comes down to earth with the introduction of Shogo, a typically androgynous hero (I'm not androgynous, I'm just drawn that way.) Shogo has landed in the psych ward for torturing animals. Because of his bar hostess mother, he associates love with violence. The story will combine his real life adventures with dreams induced by shock therapy, hypnosis, or a serious crack on the head received when the angry boyfriend of a woman training Shogo to compete in marathons runs him off a mountain road. If you can make sense of that last bit, it accurately describes an incident in Apollo's Song.

Osamu Tezuka is commonly referred to as the God of Manga, and that he may be. His drawing style, however, is a period piece by more contemporary standards. His secondary characters are cartoons with funny faces. HIs sophistication shows only in his page construction and the wildness of his narratives. This edition comes with a quote from Publishers Weekly: "His work deals with the most profound questions of human existence." I suspect that statement was written to accompany his series on Buddha and not something like Apollo's Song.

Osamu Tezuka 1970
Woody Allen 1972

I'm not androgynous. I'm just drawn that way

MANGA MANIA: MW by Osamu Tezuka

This is by the creator of Astro Boy?

I read that later in life, Tezuka wanted to do something with a more adult theme than the work he was best known for. "More adult" in this case does not mean more emotionally or morally complex. It is simply outrageous, blissfully disdainful of credibility, and full of sex -- hetero-, homo-, and bestial. It is also over 500 pages long, but I suppose all those manga that come in installments are this long or longer. Still it is an intimidating tome.

Michio Yuki is a ten-year-old kidnap victim held prisoner in a cave on a Japanese island. He and his teenage captor make love that one night together. ("You're as pretty as a girl," the older boy keeps saying.) The next morning, everyone on the island is dead, due to the leak of a poison gas, the titular MW, stored there by Country X. (Now who could that be?) Yuki and his captor/boyfriend have escaped because of the altitude of their cave hideout. But tiny Yuki. it turns out, is short enough to inhale enough of the residual gas to lose any sense of morality. 

Jump twenty or so years forward. Yuki is a strikingly handsome assistant bank manager by day and notoriously violent kidnapper on his off hours. His childhood captor, sorry I forget his original name and don't have the book in front of me, has become a Catholic priest named Father Garais. Yuki, knowing that what is said in the confessional cannot be repeated, confesses on a regular basis to Father Garais, They also have frequent sexual liaisons. Father Garais suffers spiritually but never turns down a roll in the hay with the still quite fetching Yuki. Yuki can also pose as a woman -- his family has a history of playing female roles in the Kabuki theater -- and seduces and murders his way to the top of the banking and political machine of modern Tokyo. His plan all along is to discover where the MW gas has been relocated and use it to destroy all life on earth. He is slowing dying from the low level MW contact he had years before, and wants to take the whole world with him. This kid wrote the book on nihilism.

MW is an entertaining farrago of sex and violence. Having it all in one, chunky volume made me feel like I was reading the worst, or maybe the best, Harold Robbins novel ever written.