This is, after all, the man who, besides inventing every kind of action hero under the sun, created an eight-volume graphic biography of the Buddha. Which brings us to “Apollo’s Song,” a 541-page graphic novel about a mentally disturbed teenage boy named Shogo, who at first just seems like a charming smartass when he’s brought before a psychiatrist for evaluation. We quickly revise that opinion after it turns out that he likes to kill small animals, and that he becomes dangerously violent when he sees people expressing any form of romantic affection. To put it bluntly, Shogo hates love. The next thing we know, the shrink is giving him a little electroshock therapy (the book first appeared in Japan in 1970 and is only now being translated into English). This sets off a hallucination, in which he confronts the goddess of love—well, an oracle of some kind at least—who tells him that he and his beloved will meet and fall in love and then one of them will be destroyed over and over, in lifetime after lifetime. This is already one strange book. And we haven’t gotten past page 42.
On page 44, we are suddenly in Nazi Germany, and Shogo discovers that he is a soldier guarding a train of Jews bound for a concentration camp. By page 78, we’re back in the hospital with the psychiatrist. And so it goes for several hundred pages and numerous adventures in which, sure enough, Shogo and a woman meet, fall in love and then one of them dies horribly and the story begins again. There’s some mild nudity and a lot of fairly graphic violence (in the phrase “cartoon violence,” the accent falls equally on both words in this instance). The themes and the stories are quite dark, which explains why a reader may do a double take with every page, since every page is covered with drawings of those cartoon people with the big eyes. It all looks so innocent, like a kid’s cartoon—which explains why the publisher has wisely posted a suitable for 16+ sign on the back of the book jacket.
Tezuka was a master narrator. Every page’s drawings and layout speed things along so subtly that you have to remind yourself that the story’s relentless forward momentum didn’t just happen. Great care went into storyboarding this monster. But at the same time, he keeps tossing new elements into the tale, elements—such as his obsession with environmental degradation—that make you stop and think (you’ll think even harder when it occurs to you that Tezuka’s concern seems completely contemporary, and yet he set down these thoughts before 1970, when environmentalism was just a baby). Themes, plot and visual style all bounce off each other throughout the book, setting off little sparks, jolting you to see things afresh. Love and violence, the unbreakable cycle of life and death—and then there is the myth of Apollo, which, despite the title, you really don’t see coming or even readily see what it has to do with the rest of the book—except that, like everything else Tezuka throws at you, you can’t get rid of it. It’s one more element that’s like a tune you can’t stop humming. This is a book that works on you long after you put it down—and to think that it looked so harmless, so ephemeral, when you first picked it up.
Maybe it’s a good thing that “Apollo’s Song” wasn’t published in the West until now. Had it appeared here when it first came out, it would almost surely have been ignored or simply dismissed. But the last quarter century has seen a complete reversal in the way the critical establishment approaches such work. Crumb had to come along. “Maus” had to win the Pulitzer Prize. But now comics get to sit at the table with the grown-ups. That being the case, let’s be fair: clear a space at the head for Osamu Tezuka and his oddball masterpiece.
