The Globe and Mail, Canada - Translated into English for the first time, Japanese cartoonist Osamu Tezuka's epic Buddha gives Siddhartha a sort of manga-meets-Jerry Bruckheimer treatment (in a good way), with its volumes seeped in divine justice, philosophy, battles between good and evil, and subplots of romance and friendship.
History has dubbed Tezuka (1928-89), the innovator of postwar Japanese cartoons (and the creator of Astro Boy), the godfather of manga and the "Walt Disney of Japan." His fictionalized biography of Buddha is a 3,000-plus-page page-turner, and in setting the key historic events in an elaborate fantasy framework, Tezuka creates an opus of fables that's as elaborate as Tolkien.
As an earnest exploration of the sanctity of life in all its forms, Buddha is also very, very funny. Liberally sprinkled with Tezuka's penchant for anachronistic jokes, toilet humour and violence, this lyrical life of Buddha owes as much to Disney as to slapstick Saturday-morning cartoons -- think Bernardo Bertolucci by way of Looney Tunes. Lavishly drawn, at times outlandishly cartoony, Buddha is, above all, a very human story, illustrating timeless issues on the nature of freedom, equality and enlightenment.
The story begins at the foot of the Himalayas, and follows the tale of the slave child Chapra, a pariah street urchin named Tatta, and Naradatta, a Brahmin monk, eventually weaving them together. Chapra becomes the adopted son of Budai, a Kosala general -- a character, like many others throughout the epic, that is original to Tezuka and not in the canon of Buddhist lore. This licence with historical fact is one of the key innovations in this story.
The four volumes chronicle the social conditions, caste and otherwise, of 6th-century BC Indian society, exploring the inherent injustices of the caste system and unnatural human hierarchy. Volumes 1 and 2 establish the time period and era's cultural climate (Siddhartha is not born until page 264), until Prince Siddhartha forsakes the privileges and responsibilities of his noble lineage. As a precocious child in a luxurious playroom stocked full of dancing girls, the prince is sickly, bored and restless.
As an adult, the charismatic Siddhartha abandons his wife and luxurious life in the kingdom for an itinerant lifestyle; he has occasional glimpses of serenity, but is overwhelmed by thoughts of the inevitability of his own death. The next two volumes depict young Shakya Prince Siddhartha's time as a wandering samanna monk for several years, through his ascetic experiment with ordeals in the wilderness seeking enlightenment and encounters.
Siddhartha spends several years undergoing austerities in the forest of trials, Uruvela, but eventually surpasses the wisdom and accomplishments of his teachers, through Volume 3, and follows tangential historical and made-up stories. The fourth volume (with the final four to come this fall and winter) closes under the fabled Pippala tree with Siddhartha's own enlightenment as he counsels his friend Yatala that, "like trees, grass, hills, and streams, humans exist as part of nature, so there is some purpose for which we live . . . tied to all that is. If you did not exist, something would go awry. You, too, play a crucial part."
Tezuka's mastery of seemingly incongruous (and sometimes inappropriate) juxtapositions, both stylistic and thematic, are in every aspect of the story. At times, the narrative tone is solemn, as with the opening scene of a hare selflessly throwing itself into the fire to feed an ailing old Brahmin (later, Siddhartha's child disciple Assaji emulates this sacrifice, to feed a litter of starving wolf pups). Elsewhere, it is just plain silly -- while bathing in a spring, the Kosai General Budai is attacked by crocodiles after dismissing his guards, telling the reader vainly, "I can't let them see the pimple on my ass" (in another panel, he bats his eyelashes and giggles bashfully, like a girl).
Throughout, it is an entertaining mix of miracles, violence, supernatural exploits, battle scenes, buffoon kings and bumbling soldiers. The soldiers have exaggerated, silly buckteeth, the forest is filled with sprightly rabbits and goofy-looking bears; in short, the book is full of typically humorous Tezuka details -- like the fact that prior to assuming his role as royal, King Prasenajit is said to have been a pro wrestler.
This juxtaposition is also in the artwork itself. Within the same sequence, Tezuka depicts a rabbit in realistic style, then delivers a rounded, cute and wide-eyed version evocative of Disney animation (he is said to have seen Bambi dozens of times as a child.) Elsewhere, the characters have the gleaming, wide, round eyes typical of modern manga, but the backgrounds are meticulously detailed like fine art of traditional Japanese landscapes. These landscapes are rendered, from leaf to blood spatter to sunburst, in fine, cross-hatched detail; the background architecture, such as the ornamental mosaics of palace and temple walls and ornate women's headdresses, are evocative of traditional Indian art; elsewhere, Tezuka employs several finely detailed pages to depict a single episode of the devastation wrought by a swarm of locusts.
At the same time, Tezuka revels in the blatant cartoonishness of the medium. Like Alfred Hitchcock, he interjects himself into the action, but rather than an oblique cameo he is himself, the Cartoonist, commenting on the proceedings, drawing attention to the very medium, and reminding the reader of less weighty comics in his own canon. He plays with language as with the drawing and content, juxtaposing high and low speech: The elegant, formal expository text and dialogue between nobles is contrasted with exchanges between characters who casually call one another jerks or tell each other to "fuck off" in the heat of argument. The translation alternates casual modern vernacular between characters (with expressions like "dude" and "peeps" and handfuls of expletives).
While careful to include the pivotal episodes in the story of Siddhartha, from his birth to King Suddhodana at Kapilavastu, when the air filled with the fragrance of petals and fruit, to the four choices that begin his quest for enlightenment (a woman, a monk, a corpse and an old man) and the encounters with five ascetics, Tezuka also takes scatological licence, including crude jokes, sight gags and anachronisms (in several instances, characters retaliate by gleefully urinating on their enemies). A greedy merchant cartwheels into bowling pins, a gust of wind blows a pocket watch and cigarettes from a soldier's toga. Later, a monk is told, "You're in the largest city in this region. Savatthi is . . . like New York or Paris, if you know what I mean," and a hot-dog vendor calls his wares during a contest of skill. There are references to extraterrestrials, King Kong, and even baseball: When an onlooker marvels that the giant Yatala has killed seven tigers with ease, the Crystal Prince wryly observes, "The Tigers hardly ever beat the Giants. Don't you follow baseball?"
While Tezuka is goofing around with the story, he also displays dynamic visual tricks, playing with the rhythm and form of storytelling through panel arrangement, especially in action sequences. When the crocodiles attack, the panels are shaped like shards of glass, oblong and irregular splinters on the page. More evidence of his sophisticated composition appears in an archery standoff between Chapra and Bandaka, with narrow horizontal panels forcing the reader's eye into cinematic panning perspective.
Taking his cue from the tenets of Buddhism itself, Tezuka straddles the mean in every facet of his storytelling: Nothing is too pious or too irreverent. Elements of historical fact and the creative licence of his imagination create an epic blend of slapstick, storytelling and fine art. For those who have tried but not "got" Japanese comics yet, Buddha is to be recommended as one of the pre-eminent works of the medium -- one that captures the interest of readers already familiar with Buddhist lore, at the same time as educating those who know nothing of it. It's a manga opus that you don't have to be a comix-centi to appreciate.
