It starts with what is seemingly a simple cold. Before you know it, pangs of hunger start settling in. You lust for raw meat. Long, thick hair grows all over your body. Your facial bone structure gradually morphs into that of a dog's. Very soon you start behaving like a wild beast, and at a certain point your body can not take anymore, and you die.
These are the symptoms of Monmow disease, a mysterious condition that turns humans into wolves in Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito, published for the first time in English. A modern thriller set in early 1970s Japan, Tezuka presents the question, "Who are the real beasts? The wolf-men? Or man alone?"
Two colleagues, Dr. Kirihito Osanai and Dr. Urabe, seek to get to the bottom of what is the mysterious cause of this disease and find out how it can be stopped. Their mentor, Dr. Tatsugaura, a deceivingly corrupt man with political motivations, instructs Kirihito to go to the remote village which seems to be the contamination point for all these victims. Kirihito encounters a backwards town where secrets and cover-ups run rampant. Kirihito contracts the disease, and through his research is able to pinpoint how to stop his progression into a wolf-man. Kirihito is soon expelled from the town, however, and undergoes a desperate journey home, encountering sadistic criminals and madmen along the way. Urabe, on the other hand, continues to investigate the enigma, going to South Africa and discovering outbreaks of the disease there as well. Urabe acts as a brilliant counter-protagonist to Kirihito, evolving into a psychological beast while Kirihito is simultaneously trying to assert his being a human.
Tezuka is mostly known to American audiences for his character Astro Boy, a small robotic kid with amazing powers who fights for the good of the public. Tezuka is often heralded as the Godfather of Japanese Manga, and with good reason. Tezuka has consistently shown throughout his career his ability to explore and essentially create most of the genres that Manga adheres to today. From philosophical tales of robots in a bleak future (Metropolis) to his epic imagining of the life of Buddha (Buddha), Tezuka not only concocted themes that still dominate Manga, but also introduced a vast array of visual storytelling elements which have had an incredible impact on modern comics throughout the world.
Ode to Kirihito is not the same bouncy and optimistic outlook as his work on Astro Boy. This is more akin to Charles Burns' incredibly dark and moving Black Hole or Art Spiegelman's Prisoner on the Hell Planet. Tezuka exhibits some of his more time-tested artistic techniques, but also ventures into the much more experimental, crafting scenes that brilliantly portray various characters' descents into madness The presence of these forays works incredibly well with the narrative, and allows the book to swell with significance.
There are so many amazing scenes in this book, it's hard to pick out highlights. When Dr. Urabe encounters blatant racism in South Africa for not being white, despite his esteemed position as a doctor, Tezuka opens up the floor to a lot of thought on racism. There is also an amazing passage where the old Kirihito metaphorically dies and is reborn as the wolf-man Kirihito. Tezuka portrays this moment with grand, violent illustrations, juxtaposed with claustrophobic panels of Kirihito clawing at his face. Tezuka ends the transition with the protagonist pawing at the ground in the middle of a heavy rainstorm, symbolizing his rebirth as a wolf-man.
There are certain minor structural flaws with the book. Occasionally word-balloons can be overloaded with words due to the translation. Since the Japanese read from right to left, the panels have been reversed to be more coherent in English left-to-right reading, which has unfortunately violated the compositions for some of the panels. Other than these tiny problems, the book is very solid and overall, breathtaking. Both the artwork and the story express incredible skill. This truly is a masterpiece of storytelling that transcends the comic form and should be read by any fan of modern literature.
