Black Jack 11

Osamu Tezuka – Vertical – 2010 – 17 volumes

I’m late to the party with this volume. Normally I read these as soon as I take them out of the box, but this one got set to the side and forgotten. For that, I am sorry, because Black Jack deserves better.

It is consistently good, and this volume is no exception. My favorite story this time around was probably “Showa Shinzan,” about the volcano that appeared in Japan in 1944. This was my favorite purely for personal reasons, since I recall reading an article about this in a magazine in third grade and it scared me so much I never forgot it. The story is good too, about Black Jack riding up to help a man who has his arm stuck in the rock face. The locals complain about the constant parade of tourists who scale the mountain despite warnings about the active volcano. Black Jack has to operate amidst the hot rocks and sulfur clouds, and has a great deal of difficulty for what turns out to be a simple problem. He gets angry when he finds out the real cause of the man’s problems, but responds in a wonderfully Black Jack-like manner.

Childhood trauma aside, “Whispers of a Dog” was the other winner for me this time around. A man, grieving after the death of his lover, asks Black Jack to implant a tape of his lover’s voice into the throat of a dog they loved, so that whenever it barks he can hear her voice. Black Jack reluctantly agrees, then the man’s life plays out over the course of a year with this dog. He gets over his lover and begins seeing other women, but of course he has a dog that says “Tadaaki I love you” whenever it barks, which tends to scare people off. The implications of this, and the climax, were most uncomfortable, but the love the dog had for its owner conveyed in such a creepy way was one of the most touching things in this book.

There were lots of others. Black Jack operating on a boy with a spinal chord problem in a war-torn country, Black Jack operating on a boy with muscular distrophy, Black Jack helping a skilled doctor get his groove back, so to speak, and the last story was the original end to the series in the 70s, though more stories were published after that. There’s an interesting essay about it in the back of the book, although it’s not hard to guess by the content of the story itself (a kind of “This is Your Life” Black Jack-style), I was pretty sure it had served as some kind of conclusion before I read the essay. There’s even a story about a man with amnesia getting his memory of World War II back, with disastrous results. There’s a little something for everyone.

It’s slightly more tame than other Black Jack volumes (the dog story was probably the strangest, although there was another where Black Jack was accused of murder and eventually saved by a pocket monkey), but there’s still plenty of strange stuff in here. Perhaps I’m slowly being desensitized to Black Jack weirdness too, I don’t know. I do know that every volume is uniquely satisfying, and while it doesn’t have Adolf beat for my favorite Tezuka work, it’s pretty close to the top of the stack at this point.