Ayako

699 pages

English language

Published Jan. 6, 2010 by Vertical.

OCLC Number:
660553382

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5 stars (1 review)

Opening a few years after the end of World War II and covering almost a quarter-century, here is comics master Osamu Tezuka’s most direct and sustained critique of Japan’s fate in the aftermath of total defeat. Unusually devoid of cartoon premises yet shot through with dark voyeuristic humor, Ayako looms as a pinnacle of Naturalist literature in Japan with few peers even in prose, the striking heroine a potent emblem of things left unseen following the war.

The year is 1949. Crushed by the Allied Powers, occupied by General MacArthur’s armies, Japan has been experiencing massive change. Agricultural reform is dissolving large estates and redistributing plots to tenant farmers—terrible news, if you’re landowners like the archconservative Tenge family. For patriarch Sakuemon, the chagrin of one of his sons coming home alive from a P.O.W. camp instead of having died for the Emperor is topped only by the revelation that another …

1 edition

Tezuka's best gekiga

5 stars

I've found most of Tezuka's hard-boiled manga suffers from some degree of tonal whiplash, or otherwise loses its grounding. Ayako on the other hand is a mature work from a steady hand.

The sense of place created with Yodoyama in the shadow of the American occupation is visceral. The Tenge family are clinging to what remains of an old way of life. They are the last rasping breaths of a dying dynasty.

Ayako is a story about Japan and its sequestration in the fallout of the second world war. Suppression is the arm of corruption and domination.

Currently this is my second favourite Tezuka manga after a Phoenix.

Subjects

  • Comic books, strips
  • Families
  • History