Some writers love their characters, and can hardly bear to have anything bad happen to them. Osamu Tezuka, though, is not one of them: particularly in his books for adults, like MW, Ayako, Ode to Kirihito, and Apollo's Song, he creates profoundly damaged -- and damaging -- characters, and then sets them up to bounce off each other like frenzied fighting cocks until he's satisfied.
The Book of Human Insects is another work in that vein, though even more so -- it's main character is a cuckoo of a woman, who "steals' the creative abilities of every person she comes into contact with, doing what they do just a bit better and more impressive and leaving them wrung out and ruined when she moves on. It's from that period in Tezuka's career when he was focusing on comics like this -- it was serialized in Play Comic during 1970 and 71, at roughly the same time as Ode and Apollo. And, to be honest, the people that Toshiko Tomura (or any of her many other names) steals from aren't much better than she is -- they're certainly not innocent, or anything more than slightly better than she is.
Tomura has just won a major literary award with her first book as Human Insects opens -- but, as we come to see, that means it's time for her to move on, since she can only have one great achievement in any field. (Since they're not her achievements, really, except in that she takes them and makes them hers.) Human Insects follows Tomura as she stalks forward into new territory, and we also slowly discover the people -- men, primarily; this is a story from the early '70s and could be read as a curdled take on a certain kind of feminism -- that she's already met, seduced, co-opted, and abandoned already.
A Western story of the same era would probably spend a long time psychologizing about Tomura, explaining why she is the way she is, with references to her childhood traumas and whatnot. Tezuka, coming out of a different tradition, just presents Tomura: we see some hints of her past, and she clearly doesn't have a healthy relationship with that, but there's none of the deadening "now I'll explain everything to you" that an American would have felt compelled to include in 1970. Tomura is nasty and manipulative and utterly self-centered: that's just who she is. And, because that's who she is, she will win, even when faced with men more powerful and seemingly as ruthless as she is.
Human Insects is not the most pleasant read, in common with Tezuka's other books of this era: in a world full of scoundrels and bastards, there is only nastiness and back-stabbing. And Human Instincts doesn't have the supernatural majesty of Ode to Kirihito or the epic family-saga sweep of Ayako (or the pure feral energy of MW), so it's pleasures are at a more human scale, and driven by schadenfreude and bemused head-shaking. These are nasty people doing nasty things, but we recognize them all: Tezuka makes them all very real nasty people, doing exaggerated, large-scale versions of the kind of petty slights we see every day. Human Insects is a misanthropic book, as you'd expect from the title, but not an unconvincing one.
Blog Archive
-
▼
2012
(395)
-
▼
August
(55)
- Read in August
- My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf
- Teen Boat! by Dave Roman and John Green
- Strange Embrace/69 Barrow Street by Lawrence Block
- Glamour in Glass by Mary Robinette Kowal
- The Titanic Awards by Doug Lansky
- The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde
- Salt Water Taffy: Caldera's Revenge, Part 2 by Mat...
- The Coldest War by Ian Tregillis
- The Book of Human Insects by Osamu Tezuka
- Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/25
- This Weekend's Blogging Has an Unexpected Theme
- Travel as a Political Act by Rick Steves
- Shrewsbury Folk Festival
- The Things You Find When You're Not Looking For Them
- Stating the Obvious
- World Fantasy Award Nominees
- Chicken In Every Pot, 2012 Edition
- Dungeon Quest, Book Three by Joe Daly
- Gaining, and Losing, Capital
- The Hollow City by Dan Wells
- Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/18
- Possessions Book 3: The Better House Trap by Ray F...
- Joel Rafael bränner och smeker
- Pointless Numbers
- Incoming Books: August 14
- It's Writing, Captain, But Not As We Know It
- Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/11
- Arbete igen - och värdet av tid
- It's Soothing Until the Moment It's Terrifying
- Jerusalem by Guy Delisle
- We're Safe From Skynet for Another Few Months
- They Eat Puppies, Don't They? by Christopher Buckley
- Two Travel Books With Very Little In Common
- Flora's Fury by Ysabeau S. Wilce
- Reviewing the Mail: Week of 8/4
- En sångskatt mästerligt tolkad
- Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips, Vol. 1...
- Nested Scrolls by Rudy Rucker
- Incoming Books: August 3-4
- Two Books About Disneyland
- Friends With Boys by Faith Erin Hicks
- Kan vi fördela annorlunda?
- Växtvärk hos Tillväxtverket
- The Great Divergence by Timothy Noah
- Grendel by John Gardner
- Because We All Need It, Sometimes
- Lust by Ellen Forney
- Hide Me Among the Graves by Tim Powers
- Incoming Books: July 31st
- Jerry Garcia skulle fyllt 70 idag
- Ghost Train to the Evening Star by Paul Theroux
- Hey, Gigantic Media Conglomerates!
- Just in Time for Hurricane Season!
- These Dreams of You by Steve Erickson
-
▼
August
(55)
Popular Posts
-
Sandy Denny dog 1978. Thea Gilmore föddes 1979. Ändå upptäckte hon Sandy Dennys musik via hennes pappas skivsamling. Nu, många år senare, er...
-
Just nu hinner jag knappt med livets vardagliga nödvändigheter, men snart kommer oktober och då lättar det. Och det kommer en massa spännand...
-
Haruki Murakami Bingo , from the inimitable Incidental Comics . This is only one square -- clickthrough for the entire thing.
-
NoiseTrade offers a lot of free music -- usually samplers or live EPs -- but occasionally there's a full album up there. Now is one of t...
-
Mark Davis - Eliminate The Toxins Vet inte hur det kommmer sig, men det kommer så mycket bra musik från Kanada att det verkar vara mer regel...
-
Det kan man ju inte tro... Lucinda Williams fyller 60 i dag! Jag tror att det var Emmylou Harris som en gång sa något i stil med: "Jag ...
-
And via James Nicoll : I Am A: True Neutral Human Bard (5th Level) Ability Scores: Strength- 12 Dexterity- 12 Constitution- 14 Intelligence...
-
This is my first "Reviewing the Mail" post to be composed in Blogger's hideous new template -- it's as Google-riffic as an...
-
Top Shelf, one of the finest publishers of interesting comics on this or any other continent, is having one of their periodic amazing sales ...
-
But I am stealing it anyway, because it is awesome: (It also reminds me of some psuedo-Impressionist watercolors -- also with tasteful A.A. ...