MW

by Osamu Tezuka. Translated by Camellia Nieh. Vertical; $24.95.

I feel uneasy writing a review of Osamu Tezuka's MW, since there's much about the book I don't understand. On the surface, MW is a lurid thriller, albeit one with so many twists that I can only summarize it in broad strokes here. In 1960, a young man, a hippie named Garai, meets a 4th-grader named Yuki on a remote island and, disturbingly, seduces the child. As the two have sex in a cave, a leak at a government storage facility accidentally releases the biological weapon MW, a gas which kills everyone on the island (approximately 800 people) except Garai and Yuki. Fifteen years later, Garai--now a Catholic priest!--realizes that Yuki's exposure to MW has poisoned his mind and turned him into a homicidal madman. Garai, however, cannot bring himself to end his physical affair with Yuki or turn him into the police. Meanwhile, Yuki conducts a string of kidnappings and murders designed to bring him closer to the men responsible for the MW leak. Over the course of the graphic novel, it becomes clear to both Garai and the reader that Yuki also wants to obtain a sample of MW for himself, so he can mass-produce the agent and "bring human history to an end."

This end-of-the-world plot is straight out of Dr. Doom's playbook, but what I don't understand about MW is its treatment of homosexuality. That's what I ruminate about in the rest of this post, so please read MW before you continue. I don't want to give away spoilers, particularly because the book is such a bizarre melange of pulp adventure, polymorphous sexuality and Hitchcockian melodrama that it deserves to be experienced by readers with as little advance information as possible. Besides, anyone who's a comics fan knows that Tezuka is the "God of Manga" and a figure equal in importance to Herge; all of Tezuka's books belong on the must-read list. It's a blessing that Tezuka's books are being translated and made available to us for the first time in comics history, especially in editions as beautiful as Vertical's. Go read MW, and then come back.

So, what does Tezuka think of homosexuality, based on MW? Some found his handling of the issue cringingly out of date. The indispensible Jog, for instance, argues that beneath MW's surface of transgressive sexuality, Tezuka adheres to a butch/femme dialectic that's heterosexist at its core:

It should also be mentioned that, to modern eyes, Tezuka's treatment of homosexuality comes off as rather embarrassing, if good-intentioned in its attempt to plead the case for society's acceptance. At nearly every opportunity, gay male desire is defined in terms of a man lusting for a slight, dainty fellow, so close to feminine that he might be mistaken for a true woman--in this way, Tezuka couches homosexuality as a sort of veiled heterosexuality, and one that handily ignores the effeminate/"female" attraction to masculinity in its own equation.

I'd argue that the situation is more complicated and contradictory. Jog is making a reference here to Yuki as a "slight, dainty fellow"--he's a man feminine enough, after all, to impersonate virtually every young woman in the story--but it's worth noting that Yuki's also a tough fighter who easily hauls around the corpses of his mostly female victims. I don't think Yuki fits comfortably into any sort of femme definition, and I doubt if it's accurate to define him as gay at all. Instead, I believe that Yuki is "queer" by at least one contemporary definition of the term, and what Tezuka presents in MW isn't a heterosexuality masquerading as homosexuality, but an overall fear of--and fascination with--dissolving boundaries.

In his book Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon, Alex Doty defines "queer" as "those aspects of spectatorship, cultural readership, production, and textual coding that seem to establish spaces not described by, or contained within, straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, or transgendered understandings and categorizations of gender and sexuality" (7). Queerness is the label for people and texts that refuse to fit into straight and gay (and butch and femme) stereotypes; queerness goes as far as to question the notion that any of us have stable sexualities and identities. (In some ways, queerness seems a natural outgrowth of Freudian psychology, with its emphasis on unconscious, hazy motivations for human behavior.) The perfect comic-book embodiment of Doty's queerness is perhaps Gilbert Hernandez's Birdland, a carnal utopia where girls get it on with girls, boys with boys, and aliens with terrans--a land where everyone swaps genitals and reaches climax without fretting if their desires conform to gay or straight behavior.

It's this notion of queerness that Tezuka treats so harshly through the character of Yuki in MW. In the entire book, Yuki expresses only one authentic "higher" emotion, his love for Father Garai. He has profound nostalgia for his lovemaking with Garai on the island, and he cries genuine, private tears after Garai sacrifices himself to destroy the bag of MW. Everything else about Yuki, however, is fungible, provisional, subject to change. He seduces both men and women--the American general, the general's wife, Garai, Miho, Sumiko, etc.--and is dangerous not because he's gay, but because he's capable of being anything: a fiery hetero lover who reignites a housewife's libido, a dutiful daughter, a devil who tempts a priest to sins of the flesh, a madman bent on destroying the world. His agent of apocalypse is the gas MW, which in its very name promiscuously combines (M)an and (W)oman into one unnatural, hybrid entity. (One disclaimer: since I don't know Japanese, I'm not sure if the book's original title mixes "male" and "female" in the same way.)

Noel Carroll, in The Philosophy of Horror, argues that the monsters at the center of horror tales create a sense of revulsion because they combine and embody categories that in our everyday world remain separate and safe: the zombie and the vampire are both living and dead; the werewolf is both animal and human; and so on. Yuki is another monster than defies categories, gendered and otherwise, and the heroes of MW are those characters that behave consistently across public personas and private behaviors. (Specifically, I'm referring to Vanase, the newspaper editor, who refuses to publish the photographs of Garai in the gay bordello because she is in a lesbian relationship and will not treat gay love as a source of shame.) For Tezuka, then, stable sexualities--like, perhaps, the "homosexuality as veiled heterosexuality" that Jog talks about--are trustworthy and heroic, and when those identities crumble into polymorphic fluidity, the result is madness and genocide rather than Birdland.

And yet. In The Astro Boy Essays, Frederik Schodt notes that Tezuka grew up in Takarazuka, a town famous for "elaborate revue-style performances, with song and dance performed by young women playing both male and female roles" (7). Schodt further argues that the Takarazuka shows had a profound effect on Tezuka's manga:

Tezuka's very early children's manga, especially Tsumi to batsu (Crime and Punishment) and works he later created for girls, such as Ribon no kishi (Princess Knight), often had page designs that directly evoked stage sets, or gender-bending stories, crowd scenes, and exotic foreign locales a la the Takarazuka theater. These styles especially influenced the creators of the shojo, or "girls" manga genre, which Tezuka later helped to develop.

And there is more than a whiff of Takarazuka-style bisexuality in Mighty Atom. Tezuka once declared in a 1978 interview that he had originally intended his Mighty Atom to be an alluring and beautiful female android; the only reason he made Atom a male robot with super powers, he said, was that he was drawing in a manga magazine for boys. But the unintended consequence of this has indeed been far-reaching [...] Atom's androgynous, cute, and long-eyelash design has directly influenced the unisex look of the male protagonists so popular in nearly all girls' manga today. (51)

Tezuka as father of shojo manga, and perhaps even of yaoi as well: what's more queer than that? Knowing this about Tezuka, however, makes situating MW within the canon of his work problematic, since Yuki is so different from the cutesy, sympathetic androgyny of Mighty Atom. It's fun to speculate on the reasons for Tezuka's change in treatment and tone; Schodt points out, for instance, that Tezuka grew tired of Atom later in his career, and perhaps Yuki--and all of MW--was an attempt to reinvent his work as nastier, fiercer, and more appropriate for an audience immersed in 1960s liberalism. Or maybe it was 1960s liberalism itself that Tezuka objected to and wanted to satirize in MW. (The Crows--the brutish commune that Father Garai belongs to--is hardly a ringing endorsement of hippie culture, and at one point in MW, Tezuka restages Patty Hearst's bank robbery as a transvestite farce.) I don't know; I can't figure it out; it remains complicated and contradictory to me.

My frustrations with MW, however, don't extend to Tezuka's storytelling, which is as masterful as ever, but which nevertheless takes a few experimental detours into genre (as well as gender) blending. Perhaps my favorite passage in the book is the beginning of Chapter 17, "Target," where Tezuka limits his formal devices to captions written in a dispassionate, objective, journalistic voice and pictures that illustrate these captions. A crusading journalist is writing an expose, and the captions offer up the text of his article, which begins with a recitation of real-life facts:

But then the captions begin to combine fact with fiction; Tezuka splices together actual information about biochemical warfare with fictional "facts" about MW and the devastation of the island. The prose in the captions remains poker-faced and objective, however, and Tezuka's drawing style adds detail and three-dimensional molding, nudging the book closer to a documentary aesthetic. Fascinatingly, Tezuka seems driven to convince the reader that his fictional creations--the gas MW and the world of MW itself--are real and fraught with danger. And then at the end of the sequence, he abandons cartooning altogether and reproduces a photo of protesters supposedly demanding the truth about the MW scandal:

Here we have another collision: just as Yuki represents a strange hybrid of man-and-female and gay-and-straight, so too this moment in the narrative collides fact and fiction in both the image and the word tracks to produce a kind of docu-drama "monster," a storytelling moment that defies easy categorization but that stretches Tezuka's art to engage with warfare, imperialism, and other vital issues of the day. He is Osamu Tezuka, he contains multitudes, and someday I might understand them.