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Theatricality in Osamu Tezuka's Princess Knight and The Book of Human Insects

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Princess Knight Part One (translated by Maya Rosewood) and The Book of Human Insects (translated by Mari Marimoto), both published in English recently by Vertical, Inc., were created by Osamu Tezuka nearly 20 years apart, for very different audiences — or perhaps for the same audience, in a different stage in their lives. "Stage" is a multivalenced word here: Princess Knight, a pioneering shojo manga created in the '50s, was influenced by the Japanese all-female, cross-dressing theater troupe The Takarazuka Revue, whose performances Tezuka had seen as a boy; The Book of Human Insects' (1970-1971) lead character, alias Toshiku Tomura, gets her start as an actress. (Since she's a symbol for postwar Japan, it's emphasized repeatedly that she was born in 1947; she easily could have read Princess Knight during its run.)

Princess Knight is about Sapphire, born with two "hearts," male and female (due to a cutesy mascot figure, in this case, an angel). Raised as a prince for political reasons, when her "princess" side is exposed, she must swashbuckle and fends off an evil demoness in the fallout (the series is set to conclude in Part Two). The Book of Human Insects is about the aforementioned Tomura, who mimics, then outright steals, the talents of the men (and women) she seduces before she destroys them.

Needless to say, both works are deeply concerned with gender "roles": with gender as performance. Each book has a sequence in which this anxiety is spelled out. In Princess Knight, the kingdom's subjects breathlessly await the birth of the queen's baby. If it is a boy, the patriarchy is reinforced, the line to the throne is unbroken, and the child will inherit. If it is a girl, all is lost (one who is unworthy, but male, will inherit in her stead). In The Book of Human Insects, Gang Boss Kabuto explains that a "woman" is like liquor; though the liquor is exactly same, it changes appearance in different glasses, and by adding a subtle twist to it, i.e. a "man" (his quotation marks, both times), it can take on a different flavor. Tezuka shows how Tomura's conquests view her, and more importantly, how they visualize themselves with her: this is particularly pronounced with Mizuno, the artist/designer, who sees himself as an angel and her as a butterfly. Tabloid journalist Asouka sees her like a big-busted American gag cartoon, falling straight into his arms. (He even has a little halo of excitement lines as his cigarette obligingly hovers a few inches away from his mouth.)

Both Sapphire's and Tomura's "transformations" are theatrical. At one point, Sapphire is turned into a swan, but looks like she's just in a swan costume — human legs are visible, and she can speak, although the other characters "see" her as a swan. Tomura swaps places with her double, Mizuno's traditional, and by all appearances, ideal, Japanese wife Shijmi: Tomura draws on her makeup skills from her time in the troupe to accomplish the ruse.

Shijmi, though, serves a very important purpose; she's the reason why "Insect" is plural in the English translation. (The press material explains that it's titled "after French natural historian Fabre's classic essays on the lives of insects and also known as Human Metamorphosis.") As aforementioned, she's Tomura's double, although she wears a kimono and behaves just as an ideal Japanese woman should. Mizuno can't help but fall in love with her (instead of troubling Tomura with her theft and her ambition and her lies, he gets a carbon copy of her that is comfortingly old-fashioned and pliant). So pliant, in fact, that Shijmi let her life be ruined by a man; it's explicitly stated that she was prostituted and then married off to Mizuno. In this context, Tomura's victims looks less like victims; each man tries to pin her down like a moth or a butterfly (her female conquests, notably, are not depicted doing this), and she resists, transforming like a moth or a butterfly to escape; admiration of them, even after they are told to their faces that she will be their ruin (she often does it herself, usually in campy manner, all villainous ho ho hos and body language). Though the male characters might picture themselves as birds or wolves, they're insects, just like Tomura, and Tezuka, a bug enthusiast, helpfully taxonimizes them in the chapter titles (Tezuka was a bug enthusiast; he took his pen name from a beetle, and his animation company was named "Bug Production.") At one point, Tomura is told, point blank, by a doctor that she has no control over her body, as it belongs to a man. They are only victims because they allow themselves to be seduced by her. If Tomura ever let herself be caught, she could share Shijmi's fate. For Sapphire, as soon as she is definitively a man, or definitively a woman, she loses.

Both Sapphire and Tomura have an audience who comment on each woman's performance for the reader; both books utilize slapstick for comic relief. The Book of Human Insects even has an occasional narrator. Sapphire's fairy tale world is inherently stagier; the backgrounds look like animation backgrounds (the Disney influence is can't-miss), and her swordfight scenes look like flashy choreography, complete with dramatic entrances (of the Errol Flynn sort — there's a Robin Hood riff). In what must have been a wink to the audience, there's even a brief sequence with a rehearsal for what looks to be a Takarazuka Revue-type show. (Not to be outdone, there's an All About Eve sequence in The Book of Human Insects, too.)

The demoness' daughter, Hecate, calls attention to the "constructedness" of the milieu, eschewing medieval drag for a ponytail and slacks, like any '50s teen. It's all drawn in clean, bouncy curves, with little to no shadows. The Book of Human Insects takes place in a more realistic, grittily drawn Japan (Tezuka was incorporating some gekiga elements into his work; still, Tezuka employs some light and sound techniques that can easily be adapted to the stage. Lights are "killed" for private or internal moments — the panel is blacked out, while the pile driver sequence is sold with sound effects. Horizontal panels often represent characters rushing along, going with the flow, interacting with each other in the middle ground or close-up; while vertical panels often show the setting, or, conversely, interiority or disruptions for the characters, when they're going against the grain, or their private face. When Shijmi's pimp sets her up with Mizuno, there's a single, darkened panel in which he signals his perfidy, which seems to exist only between him and the reader. Fights are still stylized, but they're brutal: Tomura is slapped, raped and punched in the gut.

Speaking of audience: Tezuka, and his audience, were almost 20 years older when The Book of Human Insects was published, and there's a lot of anxiety centered on that. None of the creators that Tomura rips off expose her, and fail in their endeavors afterward, even if she doesn't wipe them out; partly, it seems, due to their shame of being bested by a mere woman, and partly due to what can be described as unease about women's changing, newly competitive roles in a still-very-new-at-the-time capitalist society. In The Book of Human Insects, women's (Tomura's) changeability is not only infuriating, it gives them an edge. There's also a lot of worry about mass media; specifically, perfect, hollow copies, which can perhaps be read as manga pioneer Tezuka's response to all of the upstarts (including female ones) that rose to prominence during the "manga revolution" in Japan in the 1960s. On page 184, 20-something Mizuno even gripes about kids these days and their music. The anarchist, of course, listens to hard rock.) This worry about copying must have been especially pronounced for someone like Tezuka, who used assistants to help draw his work. Fittingly, Tomura has her own critic, a stage director who knows about her only link left to her "humanity." The director gives way to a photographer, whose "art" is perfect reproduction (the director is always complaining that Tomura can only mimic, not create).

Vertical's take on the books' 21st century, American demographics points to a generation gap, as well. Princess Knight reads right to left, since it's aimed at younger readers who have grown up reading manga; The Book of Human Insects is aiming for an adult, lit and lit-comics crowd, so it reads left to right. Both books' promotional copy helpfully explains where each book lands on the Feminist Comics Scale (Sapphire is "proto-feminist," while Tomura is "far from a feminist role model"). Since neither character is willing to commit to one identity — since both are acting, fluctuating between one role and the next — it might be more accurate to measure the distance between them in innocence. Tomura seeks to return to a more childlike, innocent time; a time that belongs to the younger-in-every-sense-of-the-word Sapphire, whose liminality calls to mind the period in an individual's life when gender roles are not so tightly enforced.

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