Apollo'S Song Manga Summary

You are here: Home › Welcome to Tezuka In English › Tezuka’s Manga Works › Tezuka’s Manga (A) › Apollo’s Song (Manga)

Category: Manga | Tags: Available in English • Ongoing Serials • Sci-Fi Tales • Shonen Manga • Strange Tales • Transitional Works • Weekly Shonen King

(1970) is, in effect, a microcosm of Tezuka’s work that combines nearly all his signature styles and techniques in one mature story.

Mythmatters: Osamu Tezuka Apollo

(1970) follows the story of Shogo Chikaishi, a young boy living with his indifferent single mother. Born after his mother had a series of affairs with a variety of nameless men, Shogo, grows up lonely, bitter and angry. Never having felt love from his own mother, seeing various animals caring for their offspring enrages Shogo and he kills them. When he eventually sneaks onto a farm and kills a chicken, Shogo is arrested and sent to a mental institute.

At the institute, Doctor Enoki attempts to use electro-shock therapy to try and clear Shogo’s mind and stop his violent behavior. Instead, the shock gives Shogo an out-of-body experience where he visits a temple and meets the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena. After subjecting him to a series of trials, she sentences Shogo to a cycle of death and rebirth where he experiences love and loss over and over again, in different time periods and situations, until he is finally able to understand the true meaning of love.

(1970) is an ideal primer for Tezuka’s works. The story follows a single pair of characters through multiple lives, each subsection gives a sample of a different one of Tezuka’s favorite genres, including medical drama, crime/thriller, war drama and science-fiction.

Apollo's

Blackguard Volume 1 Review • Anime Uk News

In this way, it touches on many of Tezuka’s favorite themes, including: reincarnation, the cycle of life and death, karma, the devastation of war, the conflict between nature and civilization, and the question of whether different intelligent races can ever coexist in peace – all organized around a core romantic story. It also demonstrates how Teuzka likes to thread multiple narratives together to form a larger story. As such, Apollo’s Song (1970) acts as a nice introduction to the way the Star System works without the need for prior knowledge of Tezuka’s cast, with Shogo being basically cast as the same ‘actor’ in multiple ‘lives’ or ‘roles’.

In the late 1960’s children’s sex education was a heated topic of discussion in Japan. Despite the misgivings of many adults, this led to more provocative material being published in manga aimed at children, which, in turn, began to start drawing an audience of university and high school students. According to Tezuka, in the afterword to the Osamu Tezuka Complete Manga Works edition (MT-037):

Presented an opportunity to produce that kind of ‘youthful’ manga. However, amongst the university student body, student activists began to incite riots and other violent incidents. As such, ‘youthfulness’ as a whole began to grow darker because of the actions of violent and bloodthirsty student radicals. Of course this strongly influenced my manga, and led me to introduce many strong elements into my story” (1977, p. 208).

The Transcendent And The Perverse: Sexuality In Apollo's Song And Mw

Sharp-eyed fans of Tezuka’s Star System will recognize Hiromi Watari as the adult form of Tezuka’s magical girl, Melmo. As the star of Marvelous Melmo (1971-72), Melmo is a child with a jar of magic pills which let her instantly adjust her physical (but not mental) age. Transforming physically into a mature woman let’s Melmo have adventures that explore various elements of adult life, including different careers, romance and sexuality, through the eyes of a child. Another aspect of Tezuka’s response to the question of children’s sex-education, Marvelous Melmo (1971-72) was partly intended to teach young girls about adult issues, like menstruation and the dangers of sexual harassment, while it entertained. This message is echoed, albeit for a different audience in her role inBetter to have loved and lost... The gods with their poetic justice, can be unrelenting. Just ask the young cynic Shogo, who sinned against love. Electroshock therapy was only meant to bring him face to face with his own violent misdeeds, but instead landed him in the court of a stern goddess. If the encounter was a hallucination, then it's a hallucination that starts to encroach on reality in this unforgettable tale penned by manga-god Osamu Tezuka and inspired by Greek myths of divine unforgiving. Sharing with his longer work Phoenix the themes of recurrence and retribution as well as the spirit of high invention, Apollo's Song explores the meaning of love and the consequences of its absence. Shogo's mother is a bar hostess, his father could be any one of a dozen of her regular patrons. Growing up, he learns nothing of genuine love and tenderness, and when he witnesses his mother in the nearest approximation of which she's capable--lustful embrace--he receives a merciless beating soon afterwards. Shogo comes to hate the very notion of love. But goddesses, who are neither the Buddha nor Christ, do not excuse misfortunes of upbringing. Apollo's Song reaches Olympian heights of tragedy as the story proceeds from a boxcar bound for a Nazi concentration camp to a dystopian future where human beings are persecuted by an ascendant race of their own clones. Will Shogo ever attain redemption, or, like the human race itself, will he have to relearn the lessons of love forever? Is it better to have loved and lost if the heartbreak must recur eternally? Love, propagation, nature, war, death--Tezuka holds his trademark cornucopia of concerns together with striking characterizations, an unfailing sense of pacing, and of course, stunning imagery. Though marked by a salty pessimism, this unique masterpiece from Tezuka's transitional period is also unabashedly romantic--and, at times, profoundly erotic. Combining a classic tale of thwarted love with cognitive ambiguities reminiscent of the work of Philip K. Dick, Apollo's Song is guaranteed to plumb new depths of the human heart with each rereading.

Review:

Dr. Osamu Tezuka ( 手塚治虫 ) was a Japanese manga artist, animator, producer and medical doctor, although he never practiced medicine. Born in Osaka Prefecture, he is best known as the creator of Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. He is often credited as the Father of Anime, and is often considered the Japanese equivalent to Walt Disney, who served as a major inspiration during his formative years. His prolific output, pioneering techniques, and innovative redefinitions of genres earned him such titles as the father of manga and the God of Manga.

Osamu Tezuka truly is the god of manga. The attention to detail is simply staggering, and he produced his hundreds of thousands of pages of manga over the decades the long, hard way. Sometimes, when reading his work, one simply must stop and marvel at the art, even during the most engrossing of tales. Apollo's Song, given to me by a friend, is quite epic, whether examined alone or alongside Tezuka's other works. It features, of course, Tezuka's unmistakable comic drawing style, combined with a dark, deep story about eternal punishment. The contrast in the story and its presentation is itself something truly amazing, and it must be seen to be fully appreciated. What happens to a man who hates the very concept of love? What must he endure in order to open up to the idea that even a troubled, abused fellow such as he can learn to truly love someone? What happens to our tortured anti-hero is nothing short of brutal, and never-ending. How he wound up being the sort of person he became can't truly be blamed on him, yet he receives retribution everlasting for rejecting love itself. Shogo's journey is at times sweet, at times violent, and at times even peppered with hope, but is always a struggle. This story is a tragedy on a truly epic scale, stretching from the past well into the future, with the only constants being his name, his appearance, his punishment... and the face of one specific woman. The remaining details all change, yet his travels are very much a spiral, leading him downward into the bottomless. This manga was made during a time when sex education was no longer taboo in Japan, and is not hesitant to take advantage of the new freedom this allowed the medium. This isn't one of Tezuka's family-friendly works. There's blood, there's nudity and enough else you don't want the young 'uns seeing. It's filled with plenty of immensely unlikeable characters supporting two very flawed, but ultimately likable people whose sad story has backdrops as brutal as the Holocaust. Apollo's Song isn't for everybody. But for those who like solid story and the inimitable crafting and style of Osamu Tezuka, it's a must-read.