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EPILOGUE The train sped through the countryside and my bag was heavy on my lap. As we were pulling away from Nagoya station, a middle-aged man asked me if I needed help putting it up on the shelf. I said I would rather hold onto it, it was important. The bag was full of comic manuscripts that my brother and I had slaved over for the last year or so. There was also a plastic container full of sugar cookies that I spent two days baking in my little toaster oven, carefully cut and elaborately iced in the shapes ofTezuka’s popular comic book characters. It was March 1986, and I had just finished elementary school. I had been a member of the Tezuka Osamu Fan Club for about a year. The fan club magazine had advertised that the studio was open for fan visitation on Mondays, and this was what I asked for as a graduation present. I had encountered Tezuka’s work for the first time in second grade, when my parents brought home four volumes of Umi no Toriton (Toriton of the Sea, 1968). This tale of a human-mermaid, Toriton, made a strong impact on me, resonating with my former knowledge of Greek mythology (characters were named after Greek gods), fairy tales, science, and ancient civilizations. I then went on to read everything Tezuka had published; this took a long time, given that Tezuka had already had a forty-year career as a cartoonist before I encountered his work for the first time. Most of the works I was reading had been published before I was born. During the mid-1980s, Tezuka’s works were considered “classics,” not particularly hip or radical—but they appealed not only to me but also to my younger brother. We sought out copies of his books at used bookstores, slowly building our collection. We soon started writing and drawing our own comics, as did the characters in Fujiko Fujio’s Manga michi. While other kids played “cops and thieves,” we played “cartoonists and editors,” tak171 172 EPILOGUE ing turns assuming the roles of the cartoonist, the assistant, and the editor. Our collaborative “magazine,” Gekkan Onoda (Monthly Onoda), was drawn on typing paper, and bound together with pieces of scotch tape. More than any other comics of the contemporary era, Tezuka’s works encouraged and empowered us to create our own. Now, looking back, it was perhaps the rather uncomplicated drawing styles of the previous era that made us feel like “we can do this,” or it may have been that, recognizing the snippets of films, folktales, mythologies , and other familiar images in Tezuka’ works, we felt that we were entitled to make manga out of what surrounded us, using even Tezuka’s works as our intertexts. The studio occupied two floors of a surprisingly small building in Shinjuku district. I was not expecting to see Tezuka on this trip—I knew from fan magazines that he had a separate studio, an apartment room where he worked alone. Only assistants worked at the main studio. At the time of my visit, Tezuka was working on his latest Phoenix chapter, the Chapter of the Sun. Assistants were busy drawing elaborate backgrounds and pasting in the texts, with research images spread out on their desks. There was another group of visitors, older boys from one of Tokyo’s suburbs. My memory of meeting Tezuka, unfortunately, is hazy and perhaps unreliable . It may have been my uncle who pointed him out to me in the hallway, as we were getting off the elevator. He was in his late fifties at the time, a tall, solidly built man, in his signature beret, a turtleneck, and a sport coat. I remember watching him as he gave instructions to his assistants in a slightly nasal voice. I was too shy to speak to him at first; I was afraid that I would get in his way. I finally got up the courage after I saw the older boys asking for his autograph . I said, in a voice that must have been only barely audible, “Will you look at my comics?” This was the moment in which I became a part of the long history of young aspiring cartoonists bringing their works to their masters, an old-fashioned practice no longer common in the 1980s. I slipped into the scene of Manga michi where the characters Michio and Shigeru bring their comics to Tezuka, or another scene...

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