Osamu Tezuka's AYAKO was a story of pure tragedy. I'd sit there thinking one person was at least decent and find out that they were quite the opposite. Following Tenge Jirou, I went into the story assuming that he was going to be the hero for his family after returning to them for so long. With a terrible father, who turned out to be a somehow more terrible human, the contrast in energy I felt from both of these people was strong enough that they seemed to fit into the niches of being the good and bad guy. But everyone is a bad guy in this film - with the most innocent being Ayako.
Even from Jirou accepting his first task (first one revealed in the story) to discard a dead body on train tracks, I figured, 'Hey. Whoever he's dealing with must have done something bad, right? This can't be too common an occurrence." But ALAS, Jirou is FAMILIAR WITH MURDERING PEOPLE. Whoa. The bubbly man getting off of the ship has some secrets. And man, were those secrets DARK. On top of this all, his whole family is pretty much falling entirely apart - a group of incestuous, spiteful, and manipulative people. The only hope being Ayako, someone who is forced to be kept underneath the house as to not be revealed to all of these terrible truths.
AYAKO seems to be a story that details that no one can be innocent - no one can be entirely good. Every character had a terrible secret exposed at some point in the story, or were exposed to facts that shatter any hopeful glimmer of what life could be. Poor Ayako was left wandering the world looking for love, but still afraid of encountering what her family had put her through. I think it speaks to the fact that we are all human, but this story takes our emotions - love, lust, jealousy, anger - and turns the dial from 10 up to 100 and exposes what I think people are all to capable of in this real world that we live in. All of the issues in the story are extreme, so much so that a majority of it's readers will not have to experience these problems - but they hit close enough to him that they could be real. And considering much of human history, I'm certain that everything in this book was inspired by some real life events.
