Death and manga, Osamu Tezuka

The place where young people encounter “death” is in manga. In the last issue of Devilman, the creature was the very image of death, a disembodied torso. In the background angels are dancing on the sea. Also, in the final episode of Joe of Tomorrow, death lies in a ring.

A work that fills young boy’s hearts with dread is Firebird by Osamu Tezuka. The Firebird is one of the few special beings that transcend space and time and have eternal life, but have taken shape (for us humans to perceive). The human races, in their particular histories, and in each their own way, have encountered the Firebird and have tried to acquire its immortality. Each also continues to fail. Humans have a limited existence (are mortal), and while we all fear death, in the end too, we all die. The Firebird is a symbol of the undulating flow of how each individual comes to understand and ultimately to embrace death in the “life” of the eternal. Each one of us is born into our mortal existence from that eternal life and are absorbed back into its flow at our death. Tezuka somberly paints a picture of how mortal humans, in various ways, try and are perpetually frustrated in their attempts to grasp eternal life. At the same time, however, those frustrating attempts at immortality can be seen as precisely one of the aspects that make human beings human beings.

The limitlessness of space in eternity that allows for only silence in Pascal’s Pensees degenerates into the warm existence into which each death is absorbed in Tezuka’s Firebird. (Of course, in Pensees, the role of the cause of this state of events is played by “God.”)

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The Structure of the Inner Life of a Philosopher (1998)
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