Pulp Poem of the Week

If someone steals your sandals

while you’re at the public baths,

you steal someone else’s.

If you’re upset about your brother’s death

why not kill a complete stranger?

Osamu Tezuka

MW

1976-1978

(translated by Camellia Nieh)

Pulp Poem of the Week

Calm down,

will you?

Have a

tangerine.

Osamu Tezuka

MW

1976-1978

(translated by Camellia Nieh)

Book Review: Osamu Tezuka, MW (1976-1978)

A young boy, Michio Yuki, is accidentally poisoned by MW, a top-secret hyper-powerful chemical weapon, which turns him into a sociopath. As an adult, his life’s ambition becomes to find a hidden stockpile of MW, which he hopes to use to kill pretty much everybody. Michio is a remarkably uninteresting sociopath because of his origins: His soul has literally been poisoned, and that’s that. Nothing else to talk about here. More absurd than uninteresting is his foil, Father Garai, a pedophile turned priest who seduced the young Michio. Priests must do what priests must do, but Father Garai’s insistance that he must try to save the soul of a hardworking serial killer rather than turn him over to the police does not play well. Grade: C