manga review: Black Jack

In a recent review for Daily Yomiuri, Tom Baker reviews “Black Jack”.  Here is an excerpt from his review:

A woman lies at death’s door, and only a mysterious surgeon named Black Jack can save her. But his services don’t come cheap. He refuses to begin the operation unless her grown son, with whom she has a strained relationship, agrees to pay 30 million yen.

This is a typical scene from one of the 26 stories collected in the first two volumes of Vertical, Inc.’s new English-language edition of Tezuka Osamu’s manga Black Jack, which initially ran in Shukan Shonen Champion magazine from 1973 to 1983. The doctor has stunning skills and shocking fees.

At first the patient’s son in this particular story goes wide-eyed and rigid at the price. But when the doctor quietly asks, “Can you pay?” the man begins to shout. “I will! Whatever it takes! If it takes my whole life!”

Black Jack smiles grimly. “That’s what I wanted to hear.” And with that, the story ends.

There’s plenty of medical melodrama in these tales, which feature frostbite, cancer, disfigurement, radiation burns, earthquakes, traffic accidents and severed limbs galore. But that’s just what’s happening on the surface. Many of the Black Jack stories have deeper layers.

Though he does the seemingly impossible–even transplanting a brain in one story–Black Jack also suffers from devastating failures, and in at least one tale he loses a patient whom he cared about deeply. The reader can never be sure how a particular operation is going to turn out.

Although he is widely condemned as greedy, he sometimes displays a softer side, helping in tragic cases for free.

Some of the stories are both sentimental and ghoulish, such as one in which a young sushi chef loses his arms–while on his way to his elderly mother’s house, where he was going to make her sushi for the first time.

The stories are often ambiguous or open-ended. In the story of the 30 million yen, it is not entirely clear what Black Jack is up to. Has he simply helped the man to recognize the preciousness his mother’s life? Or does he really intend to make him a debt slave for the rest of his days?

How you answer that question depends on your sense of his character, which is only gradually revealed. Also doled out in small doses is the story of his origin, including how he wound up with two different skin colors on his face. Two volumes in, there are still a few things I would like to know. Luckily, Volume 3 is due out in January.

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