Rather ironically, Osamu Tezuka’s 1970 Apollo’s Song is a gekiga manga, a genre that was initially created as a reaction to the heavily Disney-influenced manga aimed at kids that Tezuka himself had pioneered, and it seems as if even Tezuka couldn’t escape the allure of wanting to do something a bit darker with a story that is markedly not for kids, even if his art style, especially with how he draws characters, remains mostly the same as it ever was.
The more detailed pages come off more as Tezuka showing off the kind of work ethic that caused him to die at age 60 rather than anything truly impressive (although I will say that I did like the art much more than I did the story); this release is a copy of the previous Vertical release where the book has been flipped to read left-to-right but fortunately the general action and flow of the panels don’t seem to suffer for this the way some series do.
Mind you, “darker and edgier” is a dismissal against works that are “not for kids!” for a reason and this bloated, 540 page tale felt like Tezuka wanted to write something transgressive just for the sake of doing so. Amongst the tales in here we have killing animals, mommy issues, being a literal Nazi, and some weird misogyny with the idea of women ruling over men (sometimes connected to the mommy issues but not always!). The loose idea tying this story together is that one man, originally named Shogo, was so despicable a character that a goddess has cursed him to reincarnate over and over, falling in love with the same woman each time but one or the other will always die before they are “united in love” (which, given that the story starts with anthropomorphized sperm swimming towards an egg, well, you can see what these characters think that love is all about).
At the same time, Shogo is being forced to remember all of these past lives as a part of the treatment for his criminal activities — which is definitely where the timeline starts breaking down. He must’ve lived several lives simultaneously for all of them to be true, and at one point even seems to go to the future which is then unhelpfully retconned as possibly just a dream, possibly real. There’s definitely a way to do that plot line well but that wasn’t the case here, because instead it feels like Tezuka wimping out over the idea of actually having his horrible main character go through character development and eschews all of that to better obtain another ending of senseless tragedy. It’s almost remarkable to see characters who claim to be rational people deliberately choosing the path that will give them the worst ending time and time again, almost as if there was an authorial hand at work dictating choices rather than letting the characters “organically” move forward.
Sometimes, even if a work isn’t “good” there’s still merit to reading it, such as providing historical context for an era or succeeding works. I’ve never read much gekiga so I cannot say how much of an influence Apollo’s Song did or did not have on following works but I can say that I absolutely did not feel like I needed to read this to better understand the “god of manga’s” style of stories. This story purports to have a deeper meaning besides sex and violence and yet deliberately doesn’t let itself deliver on it (I spent the entire volume thinking that this was a pretty unjustified punishment for whatever woman it was whose fate had been tied to Shogo’s, and the implication that it’s the goddess herself willingly doing it sure adds another layer of “uh” to the whole work).
I’ll confess that I haven’t come across a Tezuka work yet that I adored, or even generally liked, but it’s not my fault as a reader that so many other writers since him have taken the same themes and made genuinely great stories out of them instead!