Phoenix

Phoenix is a sequence of largely independent volumes, each set in a different era, alternating between the distant past and the far future and moving steadily toward the present from both directions.

Tezuka intended the two sequences to meet in his own time. He worked on it across more than twenty years and died before completing it, which leaves the cycle permanently open.

Written from both ends of history toward the present, and stopped before the two halves met.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The phoenix appears in every volume, usually briefly, and its blood confers immortality on anyone who drinks it. Almost everyone who seeks it is destroyed by the pursuit or by the achievement.

It functions less as a character than as a fixed point: an indifferent witness to human behaviour that recurs across thousands of years and is not impressed by any of it.

The cycle's most consistent argument is that eternal life is a catastrophe. Characters who obtain it are marooned, forced to watch everything they valued decay, and in several volumes reduced to something barely conscious.

Tezuka returns to this so often that it becomes the work's organising proposition: meaning depends on ending, and removing the ending removes the meaning.

Souls recur across volumes in different bodies and circumstances, so a character destroyed in a prehistoric story may return thousands of years later in an entirely different role.

The Buddhist framework is explicit. The cycle treats history as a wheel rather than as progress, and its future volumes are frequently more brutal than its ancient ones.

Dawn concerns a tribal conflict in ancient Japan; Future is a bleak account of underground cities and the end of humanity; Karma follows a bandit and a sculptor across a lifetime; Sun braids a seventh-century war with a dystopian future.

Karma and Sun are usually named the strongest, and each stands entirely alone.

The volumes vary considerably. Some are sustained and formally daring; others are hurried, and Tezuka restarted the project more than once when a magazine folded or an approach stopped working.

The unevenness is part of reading it honestly. This is a body of work rather than a finished novel, and it contains genuine failures alongside its best material.

Tezuka uses the cycle to try things his commercial work could not accommodate: pages with no panel borders, sequences without dialogue running for many pages, abrupt shifts into abstraction.

Future in particular contains long wordless passages that are among the most ambitious sequential art produced anywhere in the period.

Several volumes are extremely bleak, including genocide, torture and the extinction of the species, rendered without the tonal relief Tezuka usually provides.

Readers arriving from Astro Boy should be prepared for the difference. This is the work in which Tezuka is least interested in reassuring anyone, and several volumes end with no survivor and no consolation offered to the reader either.

The future volumes engage seriously with artificial intelligence, environmental collapse, space colonisation and machine governance, decades before those became standard manga subjects.

The historical volumes are researched with equal care, drawing on Japanese mythology, Buddhist iconography and documented conflicts of the periods they depict, and Tezuka is willing to leave the reader without a guide to which elements are invented.

The cartoon figures remain, but the backgrounds and effects become increasingly elaborate — landscapes, crowds and cosmic sequences rendered with a density his earlier work avoided.

The contrast between simple characters and enormously detailed environments is doing thematic work: small, round, temporary people against vast indifferent settings.

It is widely regarded as Tezuka's masterwork and among the most ambitious things attempted in the medium, though it is much less read than Astro Boy or Black Jack.

Its incompleteness is part of its standing. A cycle about the impossibility of concluding anything was itself left unconcluded, which readers have found difficult to treat as coincidence.

Volumes can be read in any order and English editions are numbered by publication rather than chronology, which confuses new readers.

Karma is the usual recommendation for a first volume: self-contained, emotionally direct, and representative of the cycle's concerns without requiring any of the others.