MW
In MW (1976-78) Tezuka combines the familiar themes, of charismatic evil as explored in Vampires, (1966-69) and Alabaster (1970-71), and government and military corruption, as explored in Ayako (1972-73), Adolf (1983-85) and elsewhere, with two new subjects: homosexuality and Christianity.
MW has been printed in English edition by VERTICAL Inc. A live action film adaptation was released in Japan July 4th 2009. No animated version exists.
The central characters are the youth Yuki, an exquisite and conscience-less mass-murderer and seducer, and his older lover Garai, a Christian priest, tormented by guilt over his relations with Yuki and his inability to stop Yuki’s many crimes. Fifteen years ago, when Garai was a wild young man and Yuki only a child, the two spent their first night together in a cave on a small Japanese island, and emerged to discover the entire rest of the population had been exterminated by a deadly gas, MW, which had leaked from a secret American depot on the island where it had been deposited after the Vietnam war. The American and Japanese governments conspired to completely conceal the incident, leaving Yuki and Garai as the only witnesses to the crime, and the continued presence of the MW superweapon. The hell they experienced on that island of corpses, plus exposure to residual gas, have turned Yuki into an insatiable killer, and Garai struggles to save Yuki from the ‘demon’ which has possessed him.
MW is another of Tezuka’s later social commentary dramas, containing fewer recurring characters than most Tezuka (Shunsaku Ban is the only major one, and his role is small). It has not been translated into English, but it is available in a three-volume French edition (see our page on Tezuka in Translation for ordering instructions). Since MW cannot be found in English, this page provides a detailed introduction to the themes and far more specifics than you will find on the summary pages for translated series, but does not reveal the general plot. Eventually, a separate page with a complete story summary will be linked below. If you can read French or Italian and would prefer to approach this work unspoiled, you should not read further.
DEVIL WITH A PLEASING FACE
The irresistible devil-youth Yuki is not one of Tezuka’s recurring characters, but a new and strange creation for this series alone. In certain ways, he can be seen a more extreme version of the charismatic villain type pioneered by Rock as Makube Rokuro in Vampires in 1966 and continued by Rock’s part in Alabaster in 1970. Unlike Skunk and other ordinary Tezuka villains, these villains are appealing characters, often winning the support of other characters (and the affection of the reader) through persuasion and charismatic domination, while usual villains rely on force. Rock/Makube and Yuki are intelligent, young, handsome, extremely vain, and ruthless. Both use disguise as a key part of their evil planning, and both are murderers, and have ambition with a global scale. The degree of evil of these charismatic villains increased over time as Tezuka played with the theme. The early Makube of Vampires is not yet a sexual creature, more a creature of pure ambition, but the Rock in Alabaster, and Yuki after him, are very vain and sexual, and rape and seduce their way to their goals. Yuki and the Rock in Alabaster are also both, unlike the earlier Makube, true sadists, taking active pleasure in the suffering of others and often targeting loved ones or torturing victims in order to extend their agony; Makube, Skunk and other villain characters, on the other hand, kill for the sake of gain and personal advancement, but not for pleasure.
In a very real sense Yuki can be said to be the most extreme and inhuman of Tezuka’s charismatic villains, the end of the evolutionary chain, because the scope of the evil and destruction involved in his plan is greater than anything Makube or Rock attempt. In contrast, however, Yuki is significantly more human than Rock or Makube, because he is still capable of human affection. The villainous Rock in Alabaster is only capable of loving himself, and much of the story of Makube in Vampires is the narrative of his systematic move away from friendship and love, which he does feel at the beginning of the story, but loses as time goes by. Yuki, on the other hand, maintains his attachment to Garai to the end, and Tezuka repeatedly makes it clear that this is a true romantic relationship, and more than simply a tormentor’s affection for his victim. Yuki loves, and Tezuka established as far back as Vampires that he believes the capacity love and affection for one’s fellow man is half of what makes us human – the other half being conscience, which Yuki lacks entirely. Thus this unique combination of inhuman sadism and human love makes Yuki both more and less human than any other Tezuka villain.
GARAI AND CHRISTIANITY
Tezuka’s choice of a Christian priest as Yuki’s lover is a very striking one, since Christianity is wholly absent from Tezuka’s major works. Tezuka does not, in this work, go into depth contrasting Christian beliefs with the Shinto and Buddhist theologies he has explored so thoroughly in Phoenix, Buddha and elsewhere. Rather he seems to have chosen Christianity particularly for its theological focus on Hell, the devil, and sin, and for its condemnation of homosexuality.
Several times Tezuka exploits the institution of confession to establish special relationships between characters – Yuki confessing to Garai who cannot offer him salvation since he knows Yuki is not sincere in his repentance, Garai confessing to another priest who tells him he is damned if he cannot turn in his criminal lover. The figure of Garai’s young female friend, the first person for whom Garai heard confession, is particularly effective – she was spiritually healed through her interaction with Garai, and Garai is strengthened by knowing he has helped her, so Yuki immediately steps in to destroy this source of emotional happiness which distracts his lover from him. In other works of Tezuka there are many great acts of evil, but the focus tends to lie on the way the perpetrators becomes less and less human as they commit worse acts, rather than on their accumulating guilt. In Adolf and Ayako it is the first sin which is hardest to commit and hardest to live with; for Garai the first is the easiest.
Garai is a man tormented by fear of hell and of his own sin, and Tezuka illustrates Garai’s agonized soul searching with vivid images of hellfire. In addition, Tezuka uses ‘Hell’ as the description of the experience Garai and Yuki shared on the island when they emerged to see all the populace dead – it was that experience of Hell which turned Yuki into a devil. While there are hells in Buddhism, Tezuka does not tend to treat them in his depictions of reincarnation, focusing instead on infinite reincarnation and the continuity of life. Christianity, then, is a means used by Tezuka to make Garai and Yuki’s activities more absolute – since Garai does not believe that he will live again, or that he has lived before, his sufferings cannot, in his view, be justified by experiences or sins in other lifetimes, and he will have no other lifetime to redeem himself. Yuki, though atheist rather than Christian, is also plagued by the thought that he will cease to exist when he dies, and that fear motivates much of his passion for destruction. The fact that Yuki and Garai do not appear in any other works of Tezuka is, in fact, typical of his late social commentary works (in fact the only prominent Tezuka character to appear in MW is Shunsaku Ban in a minor role), but it also underlines the fact that, unlike most of Tezuka’s characters, they believe they have never lived before and never will again.
Homosexuality is, Tezuka knows, far more strictly suppressed in Catholicism than it is in Japanese society, and Garai’s vows of celibacy make his relationship with Yuki more forbidden, and his sin more grave, not because homosexuality itself is an evil, but because Garai thinks it is.
TEZUKA’S PORTRAYAL OF HOMOSEXUALITY
Since shounen ai (male-male homosexual romance stories) has become a major genre of manga, it is interesting to examine the way the founder of modern manga treats the subject of homosexuality. Of the pair, Garai is strictly masculine, while Yuki is extremely effeminate, not only dressing as women as part of his many schemes, but also simply feminine in his build, especially his hands. The fact that his brother is famous for playing women in the Kabuki theater highlights this effeminacy. At one point, while describing his plight to another priest, Garai even describes Yuki as "transforming into a woman" in order to tempt him into bed, though the accompanying images clearly show Yuki as still male. While Garai is tormented by guilt over his homosexual relations with Yuki, the story is clearly not a condemnation, and Garai’s guilt is more over violating his priestly vows. This series has more sexual scenes than just about any other Tezuka manga, of which the homosexual scenes between the lovers are often more beautiful and sensitive than those of heterosexual couples, and drawn in exactly the same style. Yuki is ferocious with, and scornful of, his female lovers, but tender and devoted, if also cruel, in his relations with Garai, and the relationship is not treated any more negatively than dysfunctional romances in Ayako and elsewhere. Perhaps most telling is a scene mid-way through the story in which Garai is threatened with public exposure of his relationship with Yuki, but is saved by a lesbian woman, a total stranger who is glad at the chance to stand up for the rights of homosexuals who are being oppressed around the world.
SECONDARY CAST:
Like many of Tezuka's later social commentaries, MW features many original characters and few recurring characters, though Shunsaku Ban does appear, not in his usual function as a detective or reporter, but as a victim of the government, blackmailed into keeping silent about the coverup.
More complete plot summary coming later.