Opening a few years after the end of World War II and cover- ing almost a quarter-century, here is comics master Osamu Tezuka's most direct and sustained critique of Japan's fate in the aftermath of total defeat. Unusually devoid of car- toon premises yet shot through with dark voyeuristic humor, Ayako looms as a pinnacle of Naturalist literature in Japan with few peers even in prose, the striking heroine a potent emblem of things left unseen following the war.
The year is 1949. Crushed by the Allied Powers, occupied by General MacArthur's armies, Japan has been experienc- ing massive change. Agricultural reform is dissolving large estates and redistributing plots to tenant farmers-terrible news, if you're landowners like the archconservative Tenge family. For patriarch Sakuemon, the chagrin of one of his sons coming home alive from a POW camp instead of hav- ing died for the Emperor is topped only by the revelation that another of his is consorting with "the Reds." What sol- ace does he have but his youngest Ayako, apple of his eye, at once daughter and granddaughter?
Delving into some of the period's true mysteries, which re- main murky to this day, Tezuka's Zolaesque tapestry delivers thrill and satisfaction in spades. Another page-turning clas- sic from an irreplaceable artist who was as astute an admirer of the Russian masters and Nordic playwrights as of Walt Disney, Ayako is a must-read for comics connoisseurs and curious literati.