Reviews for Ayako

The average rating for Ayako based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-14 00:00:00 Stephan Moore copypasta from a class essay @w@: Osamu Tezuka was as invested in his fans as they were in him; the feelings of his readers were paramount, and he would often adjust the tone, pace, or emphasis of his work in response to the reactions of his audience. After achieving mainstream success and gratuitous accolades from very early in his career, Tezuka remained somewhat preoccupied with being liked. As such, his style would frequently change to suit the want of his constituency - sometimes in the middle of a series. The results of these shifts were mixed, but Tezuka would always persist until he reached another plateau of resonance with his readers. In the late 60's, with the dark and mature genre of gekiga on the rise, Tezuka's work fell out of favor with critics and audiences; his comparatively simplistic plots and ideologies began to seem outdated and no longer relevant within a medium that was struggling to hold an artistic legitimacy within the mind of the public. Though he remained mostly dismissive of this movement as a frivolous fad, he could not ignore the market's opinion, and the influence of gekiga ultimately left a mark on Tezuka's work that never faded. In the early 70's his work began to take on a heavier and more sober tone, due not only to gekiga and the waning spotlight upon his work, but also to his studio's business difficulties - culminating with the folding of COM magazine which was, ironically, an anthology founded as a response to gekiga. Though the somberness lasted for the duration of his career, the culmination of Tezuka's "dark period" is, in many ways, 1972's Ayako. Tezuka had previously been toying with a more realistic style in lightly sci-fi works such as Apollo's Song and Ode to Kirihito, it is Ayako that first realizes a fully a serious tone and realistic ground. Tezuka mercifully holds back his infamous urge to punctuate the most serious scenes with off-color comic relief, and thus this work is relentlessly dry by Tezukan standards; jokes are rare, gags are even rarer, and caricature is used perhaps once or twice. Further isolating Ayako from the rest of his oeuvre is the absence of Tezuka's "star system," a device adopted at the beginning of his career that treats his cartoon cast as actors, allowing the same characters to return in different roles. Normally a new Tezuka work is populated with familiar faces that act as winking self-references, lending his stories a certain exclusivity that comforts and rewards the more experienced reader (as do the recurring gags and caricature that are likewise absent from Ayako). The absence of these standards creates an abject distance and discomfort for those used to Tezuka's adventure stories, emphatically tethering Ayako to the real world, separate from Tezukan lore. At the same time, real events are weaved into the plot, marrying the narrative to real-life history. The story takes place in the immediate aftermath of the war, as the P.O.W.s are being returned to Japan. This choice of setting is very purposeful, providing us with a keen and obvious metaphor for the state of Japan: Ayako herself. She is the youngest daughter of a land-owning Japanese clan who clings to feudal tradition, at the cost of their family's welfare (and, ultimately, survival). The retrograde Tenge clan treats her with cruelty and intolerance, locking her away in a room for most of her life - a blatant metaphor for Japan's centuries of isolation. As these old ways disintegrate, Ayako is "freed" and whisked away by her brother, a soldier in the war turned U.S. collaborator who is an embodiment of the American occupation and influence. Though he has the best of intentions, and grants her great wealth, she is also met with indirect ramifications of her brother's violent and corrupt lifestyle (he is an individualist American-style gangster). The traditional and retrograde family clan holding tightly to the old ways, and the misguided interference of a violent and callous guardian: both of these forces cause damage and distress upon the Japanese body (the naïve and virginal Ayako). She helplessly takes the brut of this abuse, and is raped, beaten, and stripped of her autonomy. Having been isolated from age 5, her mental and emotional growth is severely retrenched, akin to what General MacArthur said of Japan during the occupation: that the nation was "like a child of 12." Perhaps that is to be expected of Ayako, going through most of her life in what is essentially a dollhouse. In fact, she essentially becomes a doll herself. Ayako, as a character, is a completely flat and static failure. Her reactions and priorities are totally far-fetched, often disrupting the gravity and realness of a mostly straight-faced story. But this is not the way her "character" is meant to be read: she is purely a device. She is an experiment, a would-be woman who has been absolutely flattened by the aforementioned sordid circumstances. Analyzing Ayako as a person is missing the point entirely: she is, emphatically, an object. There is deliberately no depth to her psychology; her only value comes from what she represents. She is sexually desired by everyone who sees her, she is passed around her family like an heirloom, and she arrives (from dollhouse to dollhouse) in a box. This packaging keeps her pristine and attractive: "Her body," says the narration, "in its youth and frailty harbored a purity that was beyond human, like that of a mannequin." (Tezuka 419) The book itself drives this point home, it's a flesh colored tome that features Ayako naked on the cover, with a child's smile, striking a vulnerable pose. Even her brother cannot withstand her sexual charm. In the beginning of the story, as a boy, he shines as the brightest hope for the family (and for Japan?), a precocious voice of dissent among his clan's misdeeds. His guileful interrogation of his relatives meets a dead end after a certain amount of trickery and corruption; he resigns himself to the family, marked by his adoption of their kansai accent (used by Tezuka here and in other works to subtly obscure the dignity of his characters). His older sister, Naoko, is politically and socially subversive, and her feminist politics also highlight her as the last beacon of her family's decency. But as Ayako is abused and locked away, she takes flight, avoiding her family in the years to come. Her actions - or inactions - are similar to those of the progressive Japanese public, who were so overwhelmed by the virulent power dynamic in post-war Japan that they had no recourse but to run off and turn a blind eye, rendered totally helpless and disillusioned. Every other character is likewise layered with meaning, and the cast is sizable, yet each actor is masterfully positioned in a stunning ballet of synecdoche. The resulting tapestry owes much to Russian literature (Tezuka was, like many mangaka of the time, an avid Dostoevsky fan), displaying a considerably grand narrative that is simultaneously poised and intimate. Though this pretension is mitigated somewhat by the tropes and the brisk, streamlined pace of genre fiction. There's a pulp improbability to the somewhat cartoonish criminal motif - the incident in which Ayako's gangster brother hides information in his empty eye socket. This balance of literary aspirations and hard-boiled detective novel aesthetic is something that Tezuka has in common with the gekiga artists of the time. I mentioned earlier that Tezuka's impetus for creating this manga, and for adopting the style therein, was the rising idiom of contemplative, adult-oriented manga. Ayako is, undoubtedly, a reaction to gekiga, but I also believe it is itself an analogical essay of the manga medium. The character of Ayako can be said to represent manga itself, an impressionable child at the mercy of conflicting ideas. Her old-fashioned family (traditional manga artists) circumscribes her potential by stowing her away without allowing her to mature. But the gekiga-like influence of her gangster older brother is equally harmful, imposing upon her a radical and dangerous new lifestyle marred by superfluous violence and absurd situational drama - yes, her elder brother is an embodiment of gekiga itself, and his failed attempt at ushering Ayako into healthy adulthood is a clear and scathing critique of what gekiga artists at the time were attempting. The work is a meditation of itself. At the end of the novel, all the characters are trapped together in a small cave, helpless and static. Ayako eventually consumes each of her influencers to stay alive, and when she is rescued she escapes into the wild, to be shaped by unknown circumstances. It is important to note that in Japanese, Ayako's name is written "奇子," with the characters for "strange" and "child," an apt description for Ayako, for post-war Japan, and for the nascent medium of gekiga.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-03 00:00:00 Michael Cataldi Buddha, Message to Hitler, Ayako, all very ambitious works that try to weave historical and spiritual themes and political commentary into exciting, masterful stories. Manga, but less cartoony, silly characters than in Buddha. Darker than either of these two works by far. Beginning in 1949 and extending maybe a quarter of a century to when he was publishing it, it is post-WW II Japan, a kind of allegory of despair and corruption within a kind of allegory, everything that happens in one fairly wealthy family, the Tenge family. These are the darkest themes I have yet to read in Tezuka so far: rape, incest, murder, extortion... and in one family... In the important backdrop are several huge actual criminal cases in Japan (think Zola) that Tezuka sees as crucial to understanding the political and social and moral decay of the period.... so there is a political thriller aspect that is reflected in this family story which is effective. Ayako is the youngest daughter, born of incest victim of incest, imprisonment for many years... and she is a kind of symbol or emblem of Japan's innocence (and female innocence, importantly, as she is a sweet and spiritual little girl corrupted by her family's moral decay which Tezuka helps us see is a national condition... yikes, why would you even want to read it?! Well, I have to say it is a great story, told by a master storyteller, who paints on a large canvas, with broad social themes, such as Tolstoy or Flaubert or Kurosawa. And I am feeling this way in many ways about the political and environmental, etc etc landscape in this country, so I can relate to his sometime despair... This is a dark, dark tale, but epic, and hard to put down, really, as with his other great works. There's one problem I have (maybe two) a kind of seventies romanticizing of the lovely, innocent Ayako, (look at her covering her nakedness on the cover) that sort of reinscribes her as victim in spite of the fact that she is a sexual victim in the book and Tezuka makes it clear she is a victim... yet on some pages she doesn't need to be naked in various positions, it feels prurient in a confusing way, given his general moral outrage... In this way he undermines his own critique of her family, depicting as he does these men (most of the men she meets except one or two!) who abuse her in many ways... who treat her as a sexual object... but he does, too... This is the one aspect of the book I didn't like, felt was "period" sexist in an ironic way, an another was the translator's struggle to depict the country dialect, which feels awkward and wooden, but overall, this is a powerful tale, an epic tragedy.