Osanai is confined within the village, gives up on his engagement to Izumi and marries a village girl named Tazu to gain acceptance and keep him safe from the wrath of the village, and does indeed contract the dreaded Monmow.Īlthough Osanai, with Tazu’s help, eventually discovers that Monmow is caused by chemicals seeping into local the river water and is able to stop the disease from progressing, he is unable to find a cure that will reverse the effects. Things go according to Tatsugaura’s nefarious plans, Dr.

Osanai to do an on-site study of Inugamizawa, where he is sure to contract the dreaded disease. Osanai, a member of the Young Doctors’ Association. Tatsugaura, who plans to publish his virus-based theory of Monmow and use it as leverage in order to win the presidential election of the Japan Medical Association (JMA), seeks to eliminate his key rival, Dr. The disease, known as ‘Monmow’, causes the bones of the body shrink and enlarge in strange proportions, making the body of the sufferer twist into a dog-like shape before death.

The story opens with the two doctors of “M” University investigating a rare incurable disease found only in the remote village of Inugamisawa – a pun on the Japanese word for “dog”, Inu (犬). It is also Tezuka’s first step into a genre he would later master with Black Jack (1973-83) and A Tree in the Sun (1981-86) – the medical drama.

Riveting our attention on deformity and its acceptance like The Elephant Man by David Lynch, Ode to Kirihito examines the true worth of human beings through and beyond appearances.Ode to Kirihito (1970-71), originally serialized in Big Comic from April 1970 to December 1971, is part of Tezuka’s general shift in the late 1960’s/early 1970’s towards more mature subject matter. Hinging upon his fate are those of his loved ones: an unstable childhood friend and colleague trapped between factions of the medical establishment that nurtured him a fiancée emotionally transformed by Kirihito's mysterious disappearance and a stranger who becomes his guardian angel, a sensual circus-act performer with volatile psychological secrets.įrom plutocratic Taipei and racially divided South Africa to backwater Arabia and modern Osaka, ambition and desire beckon 'normal men' to behave uglier than any beast. While he ends up traveling the world to discover what it takes to be cured of such a disease, a conspiracy back home attempts to explain away his absence. A promising young doctor, Kirihito Osanai visits a remote Japanese mountain village to investigate the source of the latest medical mystery.

Osamu tezuka kirihito