Osamu Tezuka. The Book of Human Insects. Translated by Mari Morimoto. Vertical, Inc. 2011.
Originally serialized in Japan as Ningen Konchuuki in 1970-71, Tezuka’s The Book of Human Insects deals with themes and motifs that have been present in his work from the beginning, but presents them to an audience more mature than we normally associate with Astro Boy, though we would do well to remember than many adults eagerly followed Astro’s adventures. Just how mature, that’s a judgment call, but The Book of Human Insects presents us with genuine violence, with thugs, gang bosses, overly ambitious industrialists, and with explicit, though not pornographic, sex, including an encounter between two women. If I hesitate to call it lesbian or gay sex, well, that’s because what’s going on in that relationship is, well, not so complicated, but it doesn’t fit into neat socio-sexual categories either. Not American categories at any rate.
One woman in the encounter is the private secretary, assistant, and mistress of one of the above mentioned industrialists, Kiriri Kamaishi. She’s being fooled and exploited, and by a woman she’s supposed to watch and follow. That woman, and the party to sexual relationship, is Toshiko Tomura, Kamaishi’s new wife in a match that’s explicitly constructed as a competitive wager. Tomura is our protagonist. The wager takes the form of a marriage contract between them that places heavy restrictions on Tomura’s actions, but which also has one clause that Tomura herself added: “Any unilateral divorce will not be recognized. And if either spouse should happen to violate any of the these terms, all of their assets shall be transferred to the other.”
There’s a certain logic to fiction that pretty much betrays how this wager is going to work out. Further, the rather absurd nature of the covenant gives this segment of the story, “Longhorn Beetle”—the third of four—the feel of parable. But then, the whole story has that feel, a feeling that ebbs and flows as the story twists and changes. The point of this extended parable, however, is nothing so simple as a lesson. Of perhaps it is, and the lesson is: what is, is.
As I said, that’s the third of four segments. The first, “Spring Cicada”, has Tomura involved with the director of a theatrical company, a graphic designer, and a writer, who is found hanging in her apartment, an apparent suicide. Tomura picks up a reporter, anarchist hit man, and gang boss in the second segment, “Leafhopper”, while that graphic designer marries a woman who’s all but Tomura’s double. In the fourth segment, “Katydid”, well, lots of things happen. The wager from the third-segment marriage comes due, the designer’s wife dies, the designer murder’s the bush-league industrialist he holds responsible for his wife’s death, an internationally renowned photographer arrives on the scene, Tomura’s private residence is burned down—she set the fire herself, and Tomura exiles herself to Greece. End of story.
And that’s not all.
Late in the story we learn about the insect framing in a statement next to an image of a moth that looks like a butterfly; that statement is delivered by the above-mentioned theatre director, who’s followed Tomura from the beginning (p. 324):
There are insects that look just like other insects. For example, there are horse flies that look like bees, nonpoisonous moth species that mimic poisonous ones, and even a type of moth that looks just like an owl! They’re born that way, knowing to mimic to survive . . .
As does she!
That’s how Tomura lived, she assumed other people’s ideas, abilities, attitudes, even their identities. She lived and thrived as they withered and died. She is thus a dark heroine. Not at all attractive.
At the same sense, there’s little sense that Tezuka is passing moral judgment on her. She’s alive at the end, but “I’m . . . so lonely. . . I could get swept away. . . “ And perhaps she does get swept away—she’s standing on the shore—but we don’t know.
As I said above, this story deals with material that’s been with Tezuka from the beginning. I have something fairly specific in mind, Metropolis, his early science fiction manga. Tomura is a descendent of Michi. Both are protean characters, not fully formed. Michi can be either male or female. While Tomura is unambiguously female, the gender of sexual partners is fluid. Michi’s form is copied from a Western statue called The Angel of Rome and she ends the story dressed as the creature in that statue. Tomura lives a life of copying.
Michi’s death is one of degenerating away. One of Tomura’s doubles, the designer’s ill-fated wife, is eaten away by cancer. Both deaths take place in a hospital.
Further, Michi is lonely, always lonely, and ever seeking her/his father. Tomura too is lonely, but she doesn’t seek her father. Rather, after each episode she returns to a small home, hidden away, where she strips naked and suckles the breast of a wax statue of her dead mother. Only here does she feel safe and secure. And yet she destroys the that home, and the statue it holds, just as Michi destroyed the machine that created the omothenium rays that allowed her artificial cells to live.
There’s nothing unusual in this, an artist using the same themes and motifs throughout a career. It’s inevitable. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they use them in the same way. Tomuras is descended FROM Michi, but she’s certainly not the same character, nor his her story the same story. Not at all. The Book of Human Insects is longer, more nuanced, and more coherent than Metropolis, reflecting Tezuka’s growth as an artist over the intervening 20+ years.
One can see that growth, and perhaps something else as well, in the drawing itself. While the characters are still rendered in a rounded cartoony style, they’re more sophisticated and varied. As is the panel layout—which you can see in this selection at ComicsAlliance. The backgrounds are sometimes stunning, vituoso pieces of realistic drawing that suggest that Tezuka used assistants. They are not quite stylistically consistent with his characters.
Among the most interesting imagery is that that he uses for sexual interaction. There’s a bit of that in the ComicsAlliance selection (it also has certain body parts pixilated out, which isn’t true of the manga itself). Tezuka is quite explicit about what’s going on, but not at all pornographic. His imagery is varied and a bit hard to describe, but what he does is evoke sensations of movement, engulfment, and dissolution. He depicts what sex feels like, not how it looks.
And that, of course, is one of the paramount stylistic features of the best manga. The drawing within the panels, the flow of the story between one panel and others, one two-page spread to the next, that is designed to evoke how the story feels, not simply how characters and incidents look from this or that vantage point. Tezuka’s early ‘cinematic’ style was instrumental in this. It’s in full glory in The Book of Human Insects.
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