Manga Review: Apollo’s Song by Osamu Tezuka
Shogo Chikaishi is an unhappy young man. He has no idea who his birth father was, and his mother supported them by inviting a string of horny men to her bed. She had little love to spare for her child, who often got in the way of getting her customers to part with their cash. Sometimes he even glimpsed moments of his mother and her clients making the beast with two backs, and was punished for it. As a result, he grew to hate physical affection and the procreative act.
So far, he’s only expressed this by attacking animals that he sees having sex or embracing, but the cops are concerned that it’s only a matter of time before Shogo starts attacking humans. So they take him to a sanitarium to be evaluated and treated. The doctor decides to try electroshock therapy right off the bat. This causes Shogo to have a vision in which he is cursed by the goddess Athena to constantly fall in love with the same reincarnated woman again and again, only to have tragedy befall each time.
He’s then transported to a life where he’s a German soldier in World War Two who falls in love with a Jewish girl being transported to the death camps. It ends about as well as you’d suspect.
Other apparent fantasy lives are one in which he’s a pilot who crash-lands on a deserted island with a female photographer he does not get along with, and the distant future of 2030 where he’s an assassin sent to kill the Synthian (gynoid) queen only to discover that she yearns to know the human emotion of love.
In what is presumably the real world, Shogo thinks he kills another patient and escapes from the hospital. He is picked up by a young woman named Naomi who tries to channel his energies into the more healthy pursuit of marathon running. Unfortunately, her fiancé strongly disagrees with this idea and tries to kill Shogo. Plus, it turns out that Naomi has an ulterior motive she didn’t initially disclose.
Love, it seems, is beautiful, but it is also tragic, and the cycle goes on.
This 1970 manga was published in a shounen (boys’) magazine, but reflected more mature subject matter than was more common at the time. Sex education was just then becoming accepted as a subject for teenagers, and as an actual trained doctor, Tezuka was a better choice than other manga artists to write about the topic. Thus this ode to the subject of eros, sexual love. By giving his protagonist a hatred of the sex act and putting Shogo through various trials that examine the concept of sexual love, we have a mostly satisfying character arc mixed with several mini-stories in different genres.
The art is primarily in Tezuka’s more serious style, with little of the comic relief normally seen in his work (though some readers may find it too cartoony for the subject matter.)
It should be remembered that Tezuka was progressive for his time, and this story was taboo-defying for 1970. By today’s standards, it’s kind of heteronormative, and very heavy on the concept that sexual love is ultimately meant to cause human beings to reproduce, and babies are the natural and intended result.
There’s a lot to chew on here, from the poor parenting of Shogo’s mother making him reject normal human emotions, through the possibilities of cloning, to a warning about ecological disaster if humans don’t mend their ways. (Fortunately, we managed to dodge the particular bullet that did in most of the humans by 2030, but we can still wreck the ecosphere if more steps aren’t taken.)
Content notes: Flaccid penis is right there on the initial splash page (which may remind some of you of the Woody Allen movie Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask despite a completely different tone.) General male and female nudity, onscreen sex both human and animal, rape, animal abuse, child abuse, suicide, anti-Semitism, period sexism. Sensitive readers below senior high level may want to skip this one.
Overall: You may have noticed if you’ve dipped into Osamu Tezuka’s body of work that it sometimes comes off as weirdly horny. This is him just openly having the story be about being weirdly horny. But not just about that, but cramming in a lot of other themes and ideas as well. This might do very well as a book club discussion for the right kind of book club. Recommended for romantic tragedy fans.
