Ayako - Osamu Tezuka
Ayako opens with Jiro Tenge returning from the war, the country defeated, its impact shock to the whole nation. He returns to his home village in the country, Yodoyama, to the grave disappointment of his tyrannical father who is ashamed that Jiro didn't die honourably in the war like so many others. Jiro finds that much has changed in the time he has been away, as much with Japan as his family. His teenage sister Naoko is secretly part of a leftist militant action group. There is also a new addition to the family, a young child Ayoko, whose parentage is not spoken about.
Anxious about loss of land under proposed new reforms, Jiro's father and patriarch for the whole feudal community, has promised to leave the land to his eldest son Ichiro in return for ...well, in return for having his wife, of which union Ayako is the result. Even Jiro is not now who he appears to be, spying for the military, one that now employs ruthless methods of control. He has been told that he must be part of an operation to eliminate one of the leaders of the leftist group, Tadashi, who Naoko is in love with.
The troubles of the Tenge family is set against the backdrop of a US-led administration that has introduced great hardship in the country. The national rail service JNR has been forced to announce 95,000 redundancies, something that deeply troubles its president Shimokawa. Thus results in an apparent suicide on a railway track, but his death is suspiciously similar to the circumstances surrounding death of Tadashi that Jiro was involved in. The police investigation leads them in direction of the Tenge family. Unfortunately for Jiro, 4 year old Ayako and a simple-minded family servant have seen too much, so the family decide to cover up. Ayako is locked away, dead to the world.
Ayako remains there as the decades pass, enduring the corrupt intentions of other members of her family, becoming too frightened to ever emerge from her locked room, unable to enter into the new world outside. When the time comes for her to be let out, she seeks out the mysterious benefactor who as been putting money in an account for her over the years. It's her brother Jiro, now a powerful businessman and gangster in Tokyo.
Ayako is an exemplary Tezuka work, 700 pages long, covering the post-war social and political climate of a critical period in Japanese history, taking it right down to an individual level. In some respects you could even see the Tenge family as representative of a closed culture that becomes embedded in its ways and unable to escape from its own incestousness and corruption, clinging to the ways of a feudal society, mistrustful of the modern world. Despite the characteristic cartoonishness of Tezuka's style the realism still cuts through and the graphic storytelling is impressive. There are many impressive sequences including a 10-page single cinematic wide angle, low level static shot of Ayako’s bedroom that captures the events that take place there. It's superbly designed to hold attention and keep you in the flow, capturing the nature and character of events. There is some exaggeration of country types and city gangsters, but distinct character motivations and behaviours that are in keeping with the attitudes that Tezuka wants to reflect as part of wider society, and it keeps the intensity and drama consistent right through to the dark conclusion.
Reading notes: Ayako by Osamu Tezuka is published by Vertical inc. The original right-to-left reading has been flipped for the English translation.
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