(Hey, if you haven't read Craig's review, the first part of this Super Tuesday twofer, go there first!)
手塚 治虫
As for me, Tezuka gives me nightmares. Seriously.
Some years back, while I was away on conference and staying at a hotel (in fact I was in Bethesda, MD, at the combined International Comic Arts Festival and Small Press Expo), I happened to have brought along Vol. 1 (1998) of the VIZ translation of Black Jack, Tezuka's very popular series about a darkly Romantic outlaw surgeon who saves patients that no-one else can.
(Re: Black Jack, as near as I can tell, the original Japanese series ran regularly from 1973 to 1978 in the Weekly Shonen Champion, then continued sporadically to 1983. In all, Tezuka did over 240 episodes. VIZ translated two volumes of Black Jack in the US in 1998-99. Vertical reportedly will be releasing a new translation for the US this fall, in hopes of eventually publishing the entire series in an estimated twelve volumes. You can read about the original here, at Tezuka Osamu World, Tezuka Productions' official site.)
On my first, maybe only, night in the hotel, I read Black Jack, Vol. 1, or a good chunk of it, before falling off to sleep...
Now, these were not the first Tezuka stories I had read; I believe those were, first, the excerpt from Phoenix in Fred Schodt's Manga! Manga! (1983), and, second, Adolf, translated by VIZ in five volumes in 1996-97. But Black Jack was the first stuff I had read from an indisputably mega-popular Tezuka franchise. And I found it disarming, to say the least, with its bizarre setups, enigmatic hero, melodramatic fierceness, and distressing habit of shuttling between Tezuka's already-familiar cartooning style and panels of photorealistic medical illustration (remember, Tezuka trained to be a doctor).
One story I read that night, "The Teratogenous Cystoma," has stuck in my mind ever since. In it, Black Jack removes a cystic tumor from a desperate patient. The tumor, as it turns out, consists of the remains of the patient's unborn twin. Then, Frankenstein-like, Black Jack pops the unborn twin parts into a doll-like artificial body and, in essence, creates life, christening the doll "Pinoko." With the body of a kindergartener and the mind of a young woman, Pinoko becomes Black Jack's assistant; she calls herself his wife. Shudder. (You can read about Pinoko here, at the fine site Tezuka in English.)
Jog the Blog--here we are, citing Jog again--wrote a terrific post about this last Thanksgiving (dollars to donuts he gives the new Vertical editions careful and enthusiastic treatment). In the course of that post, Jog observes that Black Jack epitomizes Tezuka's "berserk entertainment aesthetic." What a great way to put it. From my POV, Tezuka's wrenching of genre is radically ambiguous, bizarre, and fearless -- is Black Jack an adult comic? a kids' comic? -- and he throws, well, he just throws some plain weird shit at the reader. Thanks partly to Fred Schodt's efforts, we've got a good idea by now of this "berserk" aesthetic: how Tezuka recklessly welds self-reflexive metacomic gags and and sheer joyous cartoon excess to even his most intensely dramatic material; how corny and self-mocking humor leavens even his most melodramatic or frightening plots. I think I had some sense of this even then, when I picked up Black Jack. But, yow, actually reading the stuff, that's another matter. And Black Jack's mix of blithesome cartooning and graphic surgical imagery? My god, unsettling.
So, anyway, back to my hotel story: I finally fell off to a troublous, flickering-in-and-out sort of sleep (par for the course for me when I'm away from home). And I had a dream, terribly vivid, involving Black Jack and an operating table, and, well, graphic surgical imagery. I don't remember a plot any more -- I don't think I could even on waking up that morning -- but I remember the imagery. Man.
The funny thing is, this was one of those nightmarish dreams that you're actually glad to have had, the kind that make you say to yourself, "Wow, that was intense." I consider it my Tezuka conversion experience. Ever since then I've thought of his work differently, and now everything I read by him seems to be suffused with the same "berserk" quality, even Astro Boy, that landmark among children's comics, where themes of artificial life, identity crisis, and the mutability of the body are rampant. (Don't believe me? Read "The Hot Dog Corps," in Dark Horse's Astro Boy, Vol. 1.)
I'm thinking here about Craig's reading of "queerness" in Astro Boy, a character whose androgyny, artificiality, and protean form make him quintessentially a cartoon, with all the plasticity and polymorphous perversity that implies. MW takes up some of the same themes, or, rather, Yuki, the demonic protagonist of MW, has these same qualities.
If Black Jack found Tezuka returning to the subject of medicine (his first career goal and an enduring interest), then MW, created in the middle of the same period (1976-78), found Tezuka working over two favored themes, gender ambiguity and impersonation, with an unaccustomed savagery. Serialized in the seinen manga Big Comic (which I gather was Shogakukan's flagship title at the time), MW boasts explicit terrors and sexual cruelty that exceed even the berserkness of Black Jack. It's vintage Tezuka nonetheless. I found it appalling and, as Craig says, lurid, but also riveting: as the cliche goes, I could hardly put the damn thing down. From a reader's point of view, it's a bit like being struck by lightning and living to tell about it.
Interestingly, the bibliography at Tezuka Osamu World (check it out, it's encyclopedic) contains this description of the later series Rainbow Parakeet (1981-83, following Black Jack in Weekly Shonen Champion):
"Rainbow Parakeet" is a criminal action Manga featuring a unique character: the parakeet is a genius actor whose specialty is mimicry, but he is also a thief. He accepts any role as a mimic, and performs it very well on the condition that the theater and the company overlook his stealing from the audience. A woman detective Senri Mariko follows him around in an attempt to arrest him, although she loves him.
Aha! This sounds remarkably similar to MW, if perhaps not so dark: we've got acting, impersonation, a charismatic criminal, and an antagonist who is hopefully smitten with same. (The setting of Rainbow Parakeet is said to be theatrical through and through, with plots about performances of famous plays such as Hamlet and even cartoon cameos by famed actors.) It seems that Tezuka's early fascination with that all-female Takarazuka Revue not only informed his seminal Princess Knight, as Craig points out, but led to a lifelong fascination with theatricality,"playing," and the plasticity of identity. MW has these themes too, though swaddled in darkness.
I note that Tezuka World also compares MW to The Vampires (1966-69), an earlier boys' comic by Tezuka centered on the evil yet charismatic Rock (Makube Rokuro), another handsome devil. MW, they say, was a freer or at least more adult take on the same character type. Of course, having not read The Vampires or Rainbow Parakeet, I'm in no position to confirm claims about their kinship to MW; but the mutability, or transformation, of self does seem to have been a pet subject of Tezuka's, something which apparently shows up in The Vampires and which Tezuka reportedly also explored in a series of short stories under the collective title Metamorphose (1976-77). MW seems to have been a gekiga-inspired, determinedly "adult" spin on Tezuka's favored, long-standing themes.
Maybe that's why reading it feels like getting caught in someone's psychic undertow. MW has not only a resistless momentum but a frightful, nightmarish quality, the result of whipping together cartoonish accessibility, a perverse viciousness, and uncompromising moral severity. I believe Craig's on to something when he suggests that the book's volatile quality stems from a fear, and fascination, with queerness and the instability of identity, a fear and fascination that coexist uneasily with Tezuka's ostensible tolerance of homosexuality.
Like Craig, I find MW hard to explain. Not long ago, in a breathless fit of enthusiasm, I described the book's premise to my wife Michele (I had lost a certain amount of sleep to the book just the night before). After listening to me bubble over for a few minutes about the book's cruel intensity, she replied, "That sounds like something I'm not going to be reading." Who can blame her? I was so taken with MW's nightmarish quality that I'm afraid I didn't make a good publicist on its behalf. But the things I like about the book keep nudging me toward seemingly negative, or at best ambivalent, language. It's simply not a pleasant story. It's entertaining, in the ohmigod-I-cannot-believe-I'm-witnessing-this way of a horror movie, but not pleasant. Certainly not affirmative.
Yuki, the story's prime mover, is diabolical, a true supervillain. He is also the quintessence of androgyne male beauty and, as Craig suggests, a magnet to almost every other featured character in the story. The fact that he is a gorgeous boy, and that his elfin boyishness is a lure to so many, is one of several unnerving things about the book's treatment of sex and sexuality (Garai's initial seduction of young Yuki, as Craig says, is disturbing--and only the beginning). Yuki isn't just "dainty"; he's a perverse embodiment, or anticipation, of Japan's rampant kawaii culture, a doll-like man described as "pretty" and "adorable." However, he's also plastic, sexually adaptable, and unpredictable (as Craig says, subject to change): as he has sex with first one character, then another, Yuki vacillates between fetching vulnerability, vulpine lust, and sheer feral appetite. Images of his sexual couplings are among the most disturbing panels by Tezuka that I've seen:
Is is just me, or does the central panel below, as Yuki has sex with the American general, evoke the blast-shadows of Bomb victims?:
Yuki is cute and monstrous, like a self-condemning distillation of Tezuka's own aesthetic (in fact reading MW reminded me of my recent trip to MOCA's Takashi Murakami exhibit, with its smashup of the cute, the perverse, and the apocalyptic). Yuki's character brings into focus, and here I think I'm in agreement with Craig, a certain ambivalence that structures the story: on the one hand, Tezuka avoids explicitly demonizing homo- or polysexuality; the story goes out of its way to tease out but then rebuff homophobic readings. Yuki's bisexuality as such is not presented as "the" "problem." On the other hand, his sexual beauty becomes the spur to just about everyone else's lies, withholdings, and failures of conscience. Beneath, or alongside, the book's ostensible tolerance of homosexuality is a moral sternness regarding the weakness, susceptibility, and sinfulness of almost everyone. MW's ambivalence on this point is, well, provocative. Provoking, anyway. Is it Yuki's queerness, his queering of stable identity categories, that makes him such a danger, as Craig suggests? Is it Yuki's very cartoon cuteness, his adorability?
If Yuki is the book's magnetic north, its themes and its terrors belong chiefly to Garai, who has the burden of the story's greatest moral dilemma. He is in love with Yuki, or drawn inescapably to him, and yet recognizes that Yuki is a fiend without conscience. Though he claims to despise Yuki, he hovers near him and becomes the unwilling confessor of Yuki's heinous crimes. And so he is in torment, "as if I'm being carved to pieces and burned in Gehenna!"(53). Often he doesn't seem to know what he wants, or what he thinks is right:
The book is rife with scenes of Garai's indecision, confusion, and suffering:
Though tortured by the knowledge, Garai keeps Yuki's secrets. Repeatedly he is reminded that, as the investigator Meguro knowingly puts it, "The foulest criminal of all is the one who witnesses wrongdoing and does nothing to stop it" (530). Garai is, in fact, an accessory of sorts to Yuki's many crimes. And yet, despite outbreaks of savage temper (and even one attempt on his part to kill Yuki), Garai cannot bear to use force to stop Yuki and cannot bear to turn him in. His fondest hope, instead, is to "save" Yuki: to save Yuki's soul. Garai goes right to the end of the book hoping for this, and in this he strikes me as the book's most complicated, pitiable, and self-deluding character.
Garai is deceived; Tezuka's scenario is bleak, hopeless, and surely suggests that summarily killing Yuki would be preferable to letting him have his way with so many victims. Garai's failure is the mainspring of MW's tortuous plot, and MW is most potent when it brings his awful dilemma to life.
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