Ayako (Vertical Inc.)

Ayako (Vertical Inc.)

English Title: Ayako
Japanese Title: 奇子
Publication Date: 2010
Publisher: Vertical, Inc.
No. of Volumes: 1
In Print: ✔
Digital: ✘

From the Publisher

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.

Change is a bitch”

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 of his is consorting with “the reds.” What solace does he have but his youngest Ayako, apple of his eye, at once daughter and granddaughter?

What you should know

Following up on their earlier success with MW in 2007, Vertical Inc. originally released Ayako in a single 702-page high quality hardcover edition (roughly 6″ x 8″) in November 2010.  In keeping with their marketing strategy of targeting a more mature “graphic novel” audience rather than a strictly manga fan one, Ayako was released with “flipped” artwork in order to make the reading order (left to right) more palatable for the average English-speaking fan.

Well received by fans and critics alike, in 2011 it was nominated for an Eisner Award.  Although the hardcover edition is out of print, in February 2013 Ayako was reprinted in a new softcover edition.