Black Jack, Volume 1 by Osamu Tezuka

Black Jack is a famous man, an unlicensed surgeon nonetheless capable of performing feats of amazing medical brilliance. This volume collects 12 stories about Black Jack into one book.

The first story introduces Black Jack. "Is there a Doctor?" shows us how a rich man's son, black in soul, crashes his car, nearly killing himself. The crash is witnessed by a nearby boy, and the rich man shows us where his son got his sense of entitlement. When he contacts Black Jack, the only man who can save his son, he is told that someone must give up their life to ensure his son's survival. The old man can live with that, and sets up the young male witness, prosecuting him for causing the crash and ensuring he is found guilty and sentenced to die, with his body parts being used to save the rich man's son. But Black Jack fools the man and merely makes the other boy look like the man's son a bit, and then giving his fee to the boy so he and his mother can escape the rich man.

In "The First Storm of Spring", a girl who got a cornea transplant from Black Jack keeps seeing a handsome young man through that eye. Black Jack is stumped by this, until he finds that the cornea for the transplant came from a murdered girl, and that her killer is still at large. By now, the girl has fallen in love with the image and tracks him down... and he turns out to be the murdered girl's killer, whose image was implanted on her cornea by the last sight of her murderer. Luckily, Black Jack saves her before the man can strangle her for knowing his secret, but she is heartbroken.

In "Teratoid Cystoma", Black Jack is asked to operate on a woman with a Teratoid Cystoma. In this case, a twin that was absorbed into the woman's body. No one else can do it, because the twin has mental powers that confound the doctors trying to remove it. She confounds Black Jack, too, until he promises not to kill her, and since she has no skin, puts her in a doll-like synthetic body. Her sister repudiates her, so Pinoko stays with Black Jack.

In "The Face Sore", Black Jack operates to remove the face sore from a man, who he later finds out is a serial killer. Now, these things are monsters from Japanese folk lore, so when Black Jack finds out who the man is, he tracks him down again, and the man thanks him... when he had the face sore, he didn't feel like killing anyone, but now he feels much better! In fact, the doctor will be his next victim! But the face sore incredibly appears again and tells Black Jack it was trying to prevent the man from killing anyone, and when the man tries to push Black Jack off a cliff, the Face Sore makes him miss, killing his host. But before he dies, the face sore thanks the doctor.

In "Sometimes Like Pearls", Black Jack recieves a strange gift from his mentor, a scalpel encased in a thick, bone-like sheath. When he travels to see Jotaro Honma, we discover he saved Black Jack's life as a boy after he fell and was terribly injured. However, he left a scalpel inside Black Jack and was too much of a coward to admit it. He worried for his life and career, since the scalpel was near the spine and could cut the spinal cord at any time. But when he finally opened him up again to retrieve it, he found Black Jack's body had covered it in calcium to protect him. Now Doctor Honma is dying and he wanted to confess the truth to Black Jack. Black Jack tries to save his mentor, who dies on the table, showing that even doctors aren't God.

In "Confluence", Black Jack's friend and Colleague Kei Kisaragi, a doctor on a cruise ship, returns to Japan and lets him know. Black Jack takes a picture album to give to him, full of Pictures of Black Jack and a woman, which enrages Pinoko, who wants Black Jack to herself. Pinoko runs off, forcing Black Jack to look for her, and then returns to Kisaragi to quiz him about his sister, Megumi. We find out that the sister was originally scared of Black Jack, but fell in love with him when she realized that he was leaving her an extra umbrella when it rained. They were both medical students together, and he also saved her from attackers. However, she found out she had advanced uterine cancer, and Black Jack saved her by operating and removing her uterus and ovaries. But with their loss, she would no longer look or be female... And Black Jack returns to collar Pinoko. After he puts her in the car, he returns to Kisaragi to give him the pictures of himself as a woman. (Kei and Megumi, in Japanese, are two readings of the same characters).

In "The Painting is Dead", Go Gan, a painter on a small pacific island, is caught in a nuclear bomb test. What he witnesses haunts him, even as the radiation poisoning makes him unable to paint. Black Jack saves him, and enables him to paint again, but Go Gan, in trying to recapture what he witnessed, is not able to. Disappointed in the painting, he gives it to Black Jack. But when the radiation catches up to him again, he knows he will die and asks for the painting back to complete it. He manages to do so before he dies, leaving a haunting image of a nuclear explosion (but which, artistically, looks like "Starry Night" superimposed on dead bodies).

In "Star, Magnitude Six", a large hospital has just lost its director, and the two men with the longest records at the hospital are fighting over the post. There is another man with an equally long record, but no one backs him because he has always been pushed into the background by other doctors. A chance encounter with Black Jack awakens Black Jack to the man's competence. When a man injured at the fireworks he and Pinoko were watching is offered to Black Jack to treat, he asks for way too much money, and suggests the third doctor, who is the only one left after the other two have been let go for bribing and threatening others to vote for them. Because of the success of his surgery, the third doctor's rise to the seat of Director is assured.

In "Black Queen", a young, brilliant female doctor is called "The female Black Jack" by her colleagues. She finds this mildly insulting, and when she gets to meet Black Jack herself, she almost insults him as well, calling herself "The Black Queen". But when the man she loves is badly injured, she finds her emotions too caught up to operate on him. Black Jack saves the man while pretending to be her, just in time for Christmas. She finds this to be the best Christmas present of all.

In "U-18 Knew", the robotic director of an American Hospital has a fault, and after discovering of Black Jack from its patients, declares that it is sick and that only Black Jack may operate on it, which annoys the woman who built it, so the computer puts the patients it cares for at risk and declares it will kill them all unless Black Jack comes. He does, and manages to save the computer, even from the woman and the technicians who want to dismantle it while the power is off. But the computer reveals that it knew about this when it finally comes back on, and decides to retire instead, as there is no guarantee that the same circuit won't blow again. Once again, the US must rely on human doctors.

In "The Legs of an Ant", a young boy recovering from Polio decides to walk the same route as the boy in a book by Jotaro Honma, who used it to practice walking. This boy is doing it to raise awareness of Polio, and he is going to do it by himself. But he notices Black Jack dogging his footsteps, which annoys and irks him. When he encounters a forest fire, Black Jack offers him a lift, which he scorns, so Black Jack tells him he can crawl. This angers him more, until he realizes that smoke rises, so crawling is actually safest. When Bikers attack him and steal his wallet and money, Black Jack gets it back and leaves it in the road for the boy to find. And when the boy is about to climb a mountain, he tells him to use the money to buy a blanket or sleeping bag... because there used to be a tree to sleep under, but now it is gone. Black Jack was the boy in the book, whose limbs were ripped to shreds in an accident, and was saved by Doctor Honma. When the boy gets to the place to sleep, he finds a blanket left by Black Jack, and makes it to the end of his road.

In "Two Loves" a famous Sushi chef is hit by a car. Black Jack saves him, but cannot save the Chef's arms. The driver, to make amends for the accident, becomes the chef's new hands and gradually learns to make Sushi like the chef did. This culminates in both of them making sushi for the Chef's nearly blind mother. But then the former driver is hit and killed, and his wife asks Black Jack to give his hands to Taki, the sushi chef. Black Jack warns her that such a surgery will be expensive... but he'll take his pay in sushi. He manages to do it, and the driver's wife asks to come and see her husband's hands at work. Taki tells her she can come by any time. At the end, she and Black Jack enjoy sushi together.

This was an interesting book of stories, and I enjoyed reading about Black Jack's successes and failures, from Pinoko to Jotaro Honma. Each story was different and interesting in its own way, with characters who fairly exuded character even though we only got to meet them a few pages earlier. Strength of characterization is just one of Osamu Tezuka's strengths, and it's used to good effect here. Black Jack, although we see most of him in the volume, is more of a cipher, even though we spend the most time with him in the novel, simply because there isn't much character to be found in doing surgery, since most of the focus is on the patient.

But we do learn a good deal about his past, and his kindness. Even though he can sometimes come across as heartless, cold and aloof, Black Jack has a kind heart, and even though he charges large fees, he is willing to forgo them to help people. He sympathizes with people whose histories are like himself, and he feels responsible for the people he saves with his surgeries. Oh yes, and he is still in love with Megumi, even though they can't be together because she isolates herself to keep from remembering her past.

Of course, the art isn't very realistic. Some characters look almost normal, while others are drawn in broad caricature. Generally, the sympathetic characters are the normal-looking ones, while the villainous or the bystanders are more caricaturized, but this isn't always the case.

And that's enough for one volume. I am eagerly looking forward to reading more. I hope they release the next volume soon.