Manga Review: The Crater

Manga Review: The Crater by Osamu Tezuka

In the late 1960s, Osamu Tezuka’s career was facing a crisis. He was still popular, with publishers quite willing to buy more of the kid-friendly material he’d become famous for. But he wasn’t a trend-setter anymore. The new generation of manga creators was into gekiga, more serious and “mature” works reflecting the grittiness of the world around them. As part of exploring new directions in his work, Tezuka was able to persuade the manga magazine Champion to publish a biweekly anthology of weird tales under the title “The Crater.”

Like The Twilight Zone, the stories don’t have any direct connection to each other, and vary in tone and subgenre. A boy named “Okuchin” appears in several of the 17 chapters, but they are not in continuity with each other. The name was just a placeholder, but Tezuka decided to have an actual crater in the final story for thematic reasons. In the American reprint, the stories are arranged in a different order than publication.

The opening story, “The Bell Rings,” opens with one proto-human killing another to steal his food. But then something makes him pause and cover the face of his victim before eating. The narrator suggests it is this sense of guilt, the “original sin”, which was the dividing point between the development of humans and other animals.

The story proper begins at a hot springs decorated with tropical plants the owner has imported because they do well in the warm and humid conditions around the springs. Three customers hear the ringing of a bell, which triggers their feelings of guilt. A motorcyclist involved in a hit and run, a veteran who killed an unarmed civilian during the war, and a widow who’d failed to rescue her sick husband during a typhoon. Each death had involved the ringing of a bell. The owner investigates and finds no bells, nor the sound of a bell.

We then switch focus to the owner, who has also imported a python. He enjoys watching it crush and swallow its live prey, getting off on the display. But he hates his wife’s cat. The cat has a bell on its collar. This goes exactly the way you think it will.

The final page twist tells us, but not the characters, what is really going on with the bell ringing. The story has some inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe but is a good variation on the theme.

The final story, “The Man on the Crater” starts in the near future. Astronaut William Frost Wiley is part of the Apollo 19 mission exploring Earth’s moon. He’s exploring the crater Alphonsus, known for sometimes emitting a spume of dust, when there’s an accident that breaks his communicator and traps him where the search that follows cannot find him. The ship leaves without him, and eventually Wiley’s oxygen runs out and he dies.

And then, inexplicably, he regains consciousness for a while. After this happens a couple of times, he realizes that the gas Alphonsus periodically ejects has life-giving properties. He’s sort of immortal now! He figures out how to extricate himself from the crater, but has nowhere to go until one of his conscious periods coincides with a new rocket arriving from Earth.

The men of 2104 initially mistake Wiley for some sort of moon mummy, but even after he establishes that he’s human, have no interest in the implications of his story. They’re there to mine uranium for the atomic war raging on Earth, and that’s it. Wiley returns to the fumarole and watches as he becomes the last human alive.

This one reminds me a lot of Ray Bradbury, especially The Martian Chronicles.

In between are stories involving ghosts, aliens, time travel, and especially fate. Osamu Tezuka himself makes guest appearances as a character, and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis has a cameo in one story.

The story that might be most difficult for modern readers is “The Two-Headed Snake”, which takes place in a near future Chicago where the black population has exploded so that they’re at nearly equal numbers with the white people. Mr. Cicero runs a prosperous pharmacy as a front, but is actually the head of the Two-Headed Snake gang, an organized crime mob that doubles as a hate group.

Mr. Cicero grew up in a predominantly black neighborhood where he was bullied and developed a rabid hatred of all black people. He’s a firm believer in replacement conspiracies and thinks his son is being taught (the equivalent of) critical race theory in school. His nemesis is Inspector Bunky of the Chicago Police Department, a black man who strongly suspects Mr. Cicero’s double life but can’t prove it.

Mr. Cicero’s young son Artie learns the horrible truth about his father’s activities and runs away. Distraught, Mr. Cicero uses all his underworld contacts to search for the boy with no results. There is a small chance that turning to the police might help, but is racist hatred stronger than a father’s love?

This one doesn’t have a happy ending, really. What makes it difficult for modern American readers is that at the time, Tezuka was still using American minstrel shows as a basis for how black characters should be drawn. He didn’t mean any insult by it, and was very much anti-racist, but eesh. As an editorial note explains, Tezuka’s art has not been changed to meet modern standards of taste because it would be dishonest.

Bonus story “The Jumbo”, written in 1974, shows him working on getting a better grasp on depictions of black people after finally meeting some and getting feedback. On a jumbo jet flight from Johannesburg to Singapore, a large spider has somehow gotten loose in the cabin. According to the entomologist on board, its bite is deadly. It’s not quite as exciting as Snakes on a Plane, but is entertaining with many good bits.

Content notes: Abuse and death of animals, Various forms of physical abuse, torture, attempted rape, male and female nudity, sexism, racism, death of children, bullying, ableism, some horribly deformed corpses. Older teens should be able to handle this.

There’s a forward by manga scholar Frederick L. Schodt, and an afterword by historian Ada Palmer.

Recommended primary to Tezuka collectors, but fans of The Twilight Zone or similar series should also enjoy this.