MW is a graphic novel manga created by the master himself, Osamu Tezuka. I just finished reading its 582 pages in one sitting.
Golly.
This is a story about evil.
But this is not a supernatural story.
I’ll try to write this for you with as few spoilers as possible as best as I can... but as always, if I’m going to make you curious about it, I’ll have to tell you SOMETHING.
MW is an unbelievably deadly nerve gas. It was developed by Nation X (psst—that’s America. Shhh, don’t tell anyone) and stored on one or two Nation X bases on Japanese soil (well, except that the bases are technically Nation X soil, legally. You know how it is). For Tezuka, MW is just the next step for Nation X/America's policies of using chemical weapons in Vietnam.
One day, a bunch of hoodlum punks came to the wrong tiny Japanese island. But while they happened to be there, that was the day that an accidental leak of the MW killed every single man, woman, and child (and some of the plant life!) on the island.
EXCEPT FOR TWO PEOPLE.
One of them was fine, because he wasn’t exposed to the gas.
The other one seemed fine, but apparently he breathed just a tiny little bit of leftover gas, and had no immediate health effects.
But it did get into his brain...
Flash forward 15 years. The older hoodlum has become a priest. The younger one works in a bank.
But he is secretly the most evil being alive.
While I was reading this, I stopped and inserted four bookmarks, and I am only going to tell you more in the context of those four pages.
1. Pages 229-230. Our anti-protagonist is talking to some terrorists... well, back in the day (1977), we called them revolutionaries, more like. Today, they’d be homegrown terrorists. Our anti-protagonist scorns their lack of creativity in the field of evil. “You don’t know how to do anything but bomb random buildings, do you? You should watch some crime movies and learn how to pull off a kidnapping!”
The very next panel is a huge one that is this big office building with the letters (well, kanji) of the company erected on top. I knew what crime movie Tezuka was talking about, because I’d been feeling the vibe of it for some time already—Akira Kurosawa’s THE BAD SLEEP WELL. If you want to understand how evil politico-industrial graft is, please go and watch the masterpiece of revenge that is The Bad Sleep Well. That’s an old saying at my house. I am NOT kidding. It really, really is. Sometimes I turn to Barbara and ask “You know what I hate? Politico-industrial graft.” I am absolutely serious, and it couldn’t have happened without Kurosawa’s masterfully noirish The Bad Sleep Well. So that’s one thing that Tezuka is drawing upon. Also, maybe slightly more relevant to kidnapping, Kurosawa’s High and Low.
2. Page 306. “Didn’t Jack Finney write a novel like that?” This appears to be a reference to The Body Snatchers. I wouldn’t mention this, but just please understand that Tezuka was also trying to give readers that Body Snatchers-level creepiness, but not through science fiction, rather through the lengths that governments will go to in order to cover up their misdeeds.
3. Page 432: “Father, gay love is accepted outside of Japan. In the U.S., some states openly condone it.” Let me make this very clear. There is a LOT of gay sex in this graphic novel. A LOT a lot. There is quite a bit of sex in this novel in general. And some of that sex is very disturbing (almost all of it involves the most evil being in existence, after all). And sometimes, not that I’m saying anything more than what I’m saying, sometimes, the gayness and the sex and the disturbing all intersect.
But Tezuka is simply showing you the story of the most evil being in the world; he’s NOT trying to say that homosexuality is bad in and of itself. This is made clear in chapter twenty, “Inversion,” where the priest is nearly blackmailed after being tricked into a room where there’s some gay hanky-panky going on, and he's caught in a compromising photo. A female magazine editor buys the photo and negatives, but then refuses to run them. After saying the line quoted above (and a little bit more), she goes home to her female lover.
Ohhhh, so that’s why a woman with a hard-edged journalism reputation had compassion in this instance.
These lines really stuck with me, because it was one of a couple of speeches where a character says that homosexuality “is really accepted everywhere in the modern world except Japan, Japan is the last country to be old-fashioned about it...” And I was like yeeeeeah. JAPAN is the last country in the modern world to be like that about teh gayness. Sure. In 1977. Uh huh. Sigh. Which states, in 1977, was Tezuka thinking of, I wonder...?
My wife Barbara: “But the Duchy of Grand Fenwick was way ahead of them.”
Me: “I was thinking it must have been Winnemac.”
4. Page 464. A certain someone needs to hide the fact that he’s strangled his wife - for a while, anyway - so he cuts off her fingers and sticks her head in the building’s furnace, completely burning it. And we see the head-in-furnace panel, there it is, with the rest of the naked body just sticking out of the furnace, head inserted. (I'm not even gonna go into detail about what he did with the body after that... nor what he did with the fingers.) Just a little note I made to myself, basically saying, “Just a reminder, folks — MW is hardcore.”
Barb: "He didn't even have the decency to cut the head off first?"
Me: "No, he wanted it still attached for something he was doing later."
Barb: "He IS a monster! Please, always cut the head off!"
So that’s it. To review: Osamu Tezuka’s MW is a single stand-alone graphic novel manga from Vertical that offers a lot of pages for 19.95. It is ONLY for persons 16 and over, and says so on the back. It is printed left-to-right for some reason, so if you fear reading right-to-left for some reason, have no fear here.
Except that you should be afraid, or rather disturbed. VERY DISTURBED. By today’s standards, this is rather disturbing. By the standards of 1976-1978, however, when it was first published, it’s OH MY GOD ARE YOU INSANE YOU’RE THE GUY WHO DID ASTROBOY WHAT IS THIS DARK, HELLISH STUFF YOU ARE DOING HERE.
If that’s your cup of tea, please enjoy.
Barb: “So was it GOOD?”
Me: “It was... disturbing. Intense. Powerful. But also... somewhat over-the-top. So it’s hard to say clearly...”
Barb: “So it was certainly a page-turner, that kept you riveted.”
