The Ant and the Giant
1961/04-1962/11
STORY
Masa and Mugi, both of whom lost their parents to war, are close friends. However, they become separated and end up living very different lives. Masa becomes a newspaper reporter dedicated to justice, while Mugi transforms into a cold-blooded gangster. Several years later, they reunite following a murder that has been staged to look like an accident. The victim is a politician named Mr. Suganuma, and soon Masa discovers that the murderer is Mugi, who was once his best friend.
DESCRIPTIONS
1961/04-1962/11 Serialized in Chugaku Ichinen Course, Chugaku Ninen Course (Gakushu Kenkyusha)
This work, full of Osamu Tezuka’s essence, was created around the time when Osamu Tezuka was serializing Astro Boy. The artwork is round and charming, as targeted for a middle-school audience, yet the story itself is surprisingly hard-hitting. It depicts people being swept up in war and gangs exploiting the postwar chaos in Japan, and strongly conveys the author’s message about the tragedy of war.
The story somewhat recalls O. Henry’s sad, well-organized short story “The Clarion Call” in its portrayal of two close friends who end up on opposite sides of justice and evil, but this “The Ant and the Giant” unfolds on a much larger scale confrontation between Masa and Mugi over many years. Mugi’s tenacious and striking presence is especially impressive; as Tezuka himself wrote in the commentary, he ended up acting on his own initiative. Although he is the villain, he constantly stays one step ahead of Masa with a vivid brilliance that makes the reader feel a little impatient with Masa.
The relationship between Masa and Mugi is also suggestive of the dynamics between Rock and Black Jack in Black Jack’s episode, “The Mark”, created much later by the author. The fantastical worldview seen in the dialogues between the camphor tree and animals, the hard-boiled, adventure-novel-like drama of a long-running confrontation between a hitman and a newspaper reporter, and the underlying antiwar sentiment and love for nature—these three elements were merged into one to create a distinctive atmosphere.
