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 Great Osamu Tezuka Book
After seeing an exhibit of Tezuka's original pages last fall, I was eager to dive into one of his more mature works. I've read a handful of volumes of "Astro Boy" before, and while I can appreciate them, I'll admit that I wasn't exactly blown away. "Apollo's Song" is one of the books that excerpts from were displayed, and since it was only one volume (versus the 10 or so of "Buddha"), that's the one that I went with. Granted, that one volume is 500 or 600 pages long, but it's still not a stack of books up to my waist.
"Apollo's Song" is a story of a recalcitrant youth whose extraordinary cruelty leads a higher power to doom him to relive a scenario (albeit in different settings) where he falls in love with a woman (she always looks the same), only to have her taken away from him as soon as he truly falls for her. As this situation repeats, the desperation of the main character becomes overwhelming. I found myself being really emotionally affected by the story, which doesn't happen all that often, and it really stuck with me. For those who haven't read Tezuka's work before (he's considered the Jack Kirby or Walt Disney of manga), it does take a little time to get used to his drawing style, but for me it did become transparent after a few pages. After only really being familiar with his all-ages, lighter work, "Apollo's Song" was a welcome shock to me.
Epic tale of tragedy
Osamu Tezuka truly is the god of manga. The attention to detail is simply staggering, and he produced his hundreds of thousands of pages of manga over the decades the long, hard way. Sometimes, when reading his work, one simply must stop and marvel at the art, even during the most engrossing of tales.
Apollo's Song, given to me by a friend, is quite epic, whether examined alone or alongside Tezuka's other works. It features, of course, Tezuka's unmistakable comic drawing style, combined with a dark, deep story about eternal punishment. The contrast in the story and its presentation is itself something truly amazing, and it must be seen to be fully appreciated.
What happens to a man who hates the very concept of love? What must he endure in order to open up to the idea that even a troubled, abused fellow such as he can learn to truly love someone? What happens to our tortured anti-hero is nothing short of brutal, and never-ending. How he wound up being the sort of person he became can't truly be blamed on him, yet he receives retribution everlasting for rejecting love itself.
Shogo's journey is at times sweet, at times violent, and at times even peppered with hope, but is always a struggle. This story is a tragedy on a truly epic scale, stretching from the past well into the future, with the only constants being his name, his appearance, his punishment... and the face of one specific woman. The remaining details all change, yet his travels are very much a spiral, leading him downward into the bottomless.
This manga was made during a time when sex education was no longer taboo in Japan, and is not hesitant to take advantage of the new freedom this allowed the medium. This isn't one of Tezuka's family-friendly works. There's blood, there's nudity and enough else you don't want the young 'uns seeing. It's filled with plenty of immensely unlikeable characters supporting two very flawed, but ultimately likable people whose sad story has backdrops as brutal as the Holocaust.
Apollo's Song isn't for everybody. But for those who like solid story and the inimitable crafting and style of Osamu Tezuka, it's a must-read.
 Can't believe it's Tezuka's
I love most of Tezuka works, but this one just way too weird. I get the protagonist is a love-hater, I get the point of love transcended time and lives, but somehow the stories does not get me as romance, or as an adventure/mystery. It just very boring. I do not care for this man or his suffering or his love/s at all. Tezuka and romance just does not goes together.
 The love-hater
SOME EARLY, BUT NOT LATER SPOILERS:
I must agree with Matthew Kirschenblatt--it's very good, but not Tezukas's best. The transition between episodes is not always smooth, nor are all episodes of equally high quality. I doubt that the translation is bad; Tezuka is capable of fantastic drawing--people's faces, architecture, nature, action--but his work is not uniformly great, and it isn't uniformly great in this manga.
After a hilarious, irreveverent, cynical prologue about human reproduction, we get into the story of Shogo Chikaishi, whose home life, from birth till 15, when the actual story starts, is a complete disaster: his mother has little time nor love to waste on him, being involved with a neverendieg series of lovers, all of whom she insists Shogo call "Papa." From as far back as he can remember, Shogo knows none of them are. One time, when Shogo spies on his mother and one of his "Papas" behind his mother's closed bedroom door, she beats him for it, and he says "Why did you have me anyway? I wish I'd never been born." His mother admits it was probably a mistake, and adds, "Well, that's what happns when men and women sleep together."
Something clicks in his mind, and he becomes a love-hater, growing physically sick and enraged when he sees people or animals about to make love. He kills many animals (fortunately no people), and through the police, arrives in a mental hopital, where a psychiatrist sets about curing his disease with electro-shock therapy. In his shock-induced dreams, he meets the Goddess of Love, who sentences him to wander endlessly, from life to life, always falling in love with the same girl, in different forms, but never being able to consummate this loove, because the death of one or the other of them intervenes. This is what creates the series of stories, some of which are touching, and some rather funny (Shogo, being an otherwise normal 15-year-old, has an amusing sense of humor himself). He learns to understand not only his own suffering, but that of others as well.
The sentence seems a bit stiff to me: you'd think the Goddes of Love would take his sad background into consideration!
It's a good read, and the prologue is priceless.
Very High Quality Read
This is an excellent Manga. Furthermore, I think it has a good chance to appeal to readers who enjoy more western graphic novels but struggle with esoteric themes found in a lot of Manga. There is something very literary about this story that contrasts with much of the other manga Ive been exposed to. File with "Fun House," "American Born Chinese" and other more personal story arcs before lumping it with "Battle Royale" or "Lone Wolf and Cub." Despite this charactization, Apollo's Song is not a biography by any means (Im getting sort of sick of autobiographical comics).
"Apollo" is basically a collection of several smaller stories that fit within a larger framework, and it holds together well both ways. It is a strong title and certainly one of the best comics of 2007 (at least here in the US, where it is finally appearing!). I think readers of mature graphic novels will be quite happy with this lengthy read.
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