MANGA REVIEW: ROBO SAPIENS: TALES OF TOMORROW (2018, 2019, 2021)

 

by Toranosuke Shimada

English translation by Adrienne Beck

Lyric translation by Jelly Cat

Lettering and cover design by Nicky Lim

Interior layouts by Sandy Grayson

Logo designed by George Panella

Proofreading by Dawn Davis

Edited by Alexis Roberts

Original Japanese language serialization by Kodansha  in Morning Monthly Two July 2018-June 2019.

English language publication by Seven Seas Entertainment in November 2021.

. . .

"If I wander about the shore this morning

It will bring me back to good ol' times"

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

Humanity constructs intelligent machines as servants, but these robots end up-somewhat accidentally-carrying the spark of our consciousness into the far future. Humanity fell in love with technology even as it fell out of love with the biological world. We built the robots to serve our whims, to create answers to our desires, to serve our truest faith-our desire for immortality-and ended up shaping a product beyond all the cynical/cyclical schemes usually dictated by ideologies of planned obsolescence. The robots of the manga future history Robo Sapiens are built to last for tens of thousands of years. This defeat of product life cycles might be the most fanciful idea expressed by this manga. 

The future depicted is vast and tragic, but the tragic elements-global wars, nuclear meltdowns, environmental degradation-are viewed at a remove. The wondrous robots who embody superhuman fantasies are foregrounded, human frailty rests in the middle ground, and human cruelty looms in the background. Robo Sapiens could be described as dystopian, at least in part. I think it's more that dystopia is a thread in the tapestry, if you will. You strip that out and you can still make some sense of the work, but something is clearly missing. The same could be said for the idea of utopia-it's not the whole picture, but you can't just rip that out, either. 

Robo Sapiens is episodic. Each chapter seems like a stand alone story or observational vignette. Then characters from earlier chapters return, change, and secrets from the past unfold line by line, memory by memory. We meet a super robot who exists as a friend to all in need-think of a shiny chrome version of Christopher Reeves's Superman-who answers all the prayers and wishes that no deity or devil or genie in a bottle ever could. There's a dutiful caretaker of a massive subterranean nuclear waste storage facility. Early on, we meet one of the last hard-boiled detectives, complete with an old school ass-kicking certain set of skills, even though much of the rest of the narrative consists of interlocking mysteries across numbingly huge expanses of time that defy the efforts of any solitary protagonist to solve.

Much of the narrative, ultimately, is driven by a brilliant but disillusioned roboticist who creates a number of the robot characters in the story. This roboticist has become disenchanted with her fellow humans who fill the world with war and waste, but much of her contempt is expressed obliquely. During a TED Talk style presentation, we see the cruelly caricatured human audience-distracted by screens, badly dressed, ill-mannered, entitled-from her perspective. Interestingly, the robots never seem to absorb this contempt. Maybe it's an Asimov thing: robot minds are programmed to show humans the utmost benevolence. It could be that the disillusioned roboticist has taken a cue from Asimov's Laws of Robotics to prevent her contempt from being replicated inside these newly created minds. Robo Sapiens cleverly chooses to respect the privacy of one of its central figures-this bitter roboticist-and therefore preserves a sense of mystery. 

However, the robots are established as having capacious minds capable of downloading vast amounts of human history in an instant, and engaging with that infodump via fully immersive internal simulations. One of the robots is able to walk through a vast swath of human evolutionary history from cave people to present. This historically enriched robot doesn't seem to view humanity in a bad light. Ultra fast robo-brains capable of sophisticated multivariable analysis of vast amounts of historical/evolutionary/psychological/economic/sociological data results, intriguingly, in empathy and tolerance. (Compare and contrast with the sadistic supercomputer conjured up in the Harlan Ellison short story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" who uses its vast intelligence and stores of data to inflict eternal punishment upon the last remnants of the human race.)

Robots are also constructed to be romantic mates for humans. This is, if you're wondering, handled in an extremely elliptical fashion. There's no explicit human-on-robot action, but the power dynamics are disturbing. For much of the timeline, robots are totally subject to human power. Even though they show intelligence and individuality, the living machines-designed in the image of humans-have no rights to disobey or resist their human masters. If a human tells a robot to do something-anything-it must comply. If a human desires a gendered robot, then the robot assumes whatever gender expression serves the human's wishes. 

As for specific sex acts, Robo Sapiens is, as I said, elliptical. Presumably, anything goes. Later in the narrative, humans seem to grant robots full civil rights including autonomy of thought and action. Later still, humans and robots have separated from each other, with the human population on the decline. Wars are alluded to, and it's possible the humans were defeated by the robots in some global conflagration. The robots don't seem bitter or hostile towards humans, even though the final remnants of homo sapiens do seem to be fearful of the robots. Overall, robo sapiens as a species don't seem to hold on to grudges or vendettas despite their long history of subjugation by humans. It's never completely clear if this easy going attitude on the part of robotkind is a moral stance of not antagonizing a non-threatening group of beings, or if this confidence came about after thoroughly defeating their former masters. Robo Sapiens contains no explicit depictions of warfare, so you kinda have to decide for yourself. It's eerie. It's ambiguous.

The art is curved, rounded, and non-threatening for the most part. There's a strong influence from Astro Boy creator Osamu Tezuka. Late in the timeline robots choose more imaginative forms, and are no longer bound to resemble their human creators. Writer/artist Toranosuke Shimada's robots evoke a formidable benevolence, as if the gods humanity prayed to for deliverance for countless generations could only be realized by futuristic comic book science. 

Robo Sapiens left me with the sense that humanity's yearning for immortality could ironically outlive the species by finding expression in robotic, artificially intelligent beings.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE SWORD OF DOOM (1966)

 Directed by Kihachi Okamoto

Cinematography by Hiroshi Murai

Edited by Yoshitami Kuroiwa

Music by Masaru Sato

Starring 

Tatsuya Nakadai as Ryunosuke Tsukue

Toshiro Mifune as Toranosuke Shimada

…

“Power without perception is spiritually useless, and therefore of no true value.”

-dialogue from the film Fist of the North Star (1986)

…

Review by William D. Tucker. 

Japan: 1860s: armed factions fight for and against the military Shogunate and the  divine Emperor. The Shogun wishes to strike a profitable deal with the foreigners from the West. The Emperor demands the expulsion of all foreign devils and total loyalty as a godlike absolute ruler over all. It is a time of violence. Men sharpen their blades and train rigorously in all forms of martial arts to wage wars covert and overt to determine the fate of the nation . . .

Ryunosuke Tsukue is a master swordsman with a strangely passive sword-fighting style: he squares off with an opponent, lowers his blade, lowers his eyes-he is leaving himself open to attack. Ryunosuke’s opponent takes the opportunity. Ryunosuke strikes this opponent-whoever he happens to be-dead with a single stroke of his sword. This master swordsman has perhaps made himself so sensitive to the sounds of his opponent’s body-maybe even to the changes in the currents of the air as a person maneuvers themselves to try to gain advantage in a duel-that he might not even need to look at his attacker to vanquish them. 

Ryunosuke is a wandering swordsman with no master, no loyalty to either Shogun or Emperor. He doesn’t seem to be associated with any criminal gangs. He is rejected as a perverted embodiment of evil by his old-fashioned kendo schoolmaster father. You could say Ryunosuke is his own master. Ryunosuke wanders Japan, getting into fights with other swordsmen, or, if he can find no one to duel, he might just kill a random person-like an elderly pilgrim praying at a Buddhist shrine by the roadside. Ryunosuke will also enter kendo competitions in order to “accidentally” crack open an opponent’s skull with a wooden sword and still be within the bounds of the rules. 

Eventually, Ryunosuke’s prowess and ruthlessness attracts the attention of armed political extremists who wish to use this master swordsman as an assassin. Ryunosuke has no political or moral convictions. He is neither a conformist nor a true believer. He fights fiercely, yet not from fear of death. Ryunosuke doesn’t draw his sword for self-defense or idealism. He enjoys killing as an end unto itself. He is a serial killer wearing the disguise of a mercenary swordsman for hire. Or, maybe he just sees killing for what it is stripped of the empty, self-justifying rhetoric of politics and religion. 

Ryunosuke goes through the motions of being a Japanese man in the 1860s. He ends up with a wife and a child. He drinks sake in the evenings to unwind. He dutifully carries out assassinations for the political faction that claims him . . . but these are not people or actions he loves. 

Well, the sake is okay. The killing is good. But he has no emotional connections to anyone or anything. Ryunosuke doesn’t seem to have emotions save for sadism and cruel, ironic amusement at how he continues to exist in a world of hypocrisy and stupidity. Ryunosuke is married to his sword. His face is a creepy, unblinking mask. He is a collection of gestures trying to pass for human. It’s not even clear if he gets truly drunk off of the sake-he might just be performing drunkenness to enhance the illusion of being human. What he is at heart is a maelstrom of violence disguised as a person. In turbulent times, no one seems to notice. Or care.

Ryunosuke, during one of his assassination gigs, finds himself witness to the spectacle of a sword master slaying many opponents who is possibly his equal: Toranosuke Shimada. Shimada is killing Ryunosuke’s fellow assassins in the extremist political faction. Ryunosuke should be joining his comrades in battle . . . but Ryunosuke has never had comrades. Ryunosuke just lets people think he has a sense of duty so he can have a warrant to kill. But Ryunosuke finds himself frozen before the magnificent technique of Shimada. Shimada is as fearsome as Ryunosuke but he spares the life of a helpless would-be assassin. Shimada has the conscience and sense of mercy that Ryunosuke lacks. 

Two swordsmen. One evil. One moral. Both capable of unleashing maelstroms of slashing carnage. Surely, if they clashed it would be like metaphysical matter and antimatter in collision. All would cease. 

Okay, maybe that’s taking things too far.

But it is certainly likely both Ryunosuke and Shimada would fight each other so ferociously that they would both perish of their wounds. Neither are afraid to die, yet Ryunosuke lives to kill. If Ryunosuke dies, he can’t kill anymore. Weirdly, absurdly . . . Ryunosuke must refuse to engage the worthiest opponent he is likely to ever encounter in his life so that he can keep on killing numerous lesser foemen and experience the one joy he is capable of having. 

Yeah, Ryunosuke is a sick and twisted fuck. 

Because Ryunosuke refuses to draw his sword, Shimada dismisses him with a disdainful glance, and strides away into the night.

Throughout The Sword of Doom, we get subjective camera work that puts us in the frightful perspective of Ryunosuke. We even get some first person shots that come oh-so-close to anticipating the steady-stalking camera work of John Carpenter’s Halloween-the one true slasher film of all time, forget all those superfluous sequels and dumbass remakes. In Halloween we have the Shape-who may once have been a person-a masked engine of murder who has no mercy and no discernible humanity. The Shape is a pure terror invading an anodyne suburban landscape unprepared to ward off a monster of pure malevolence. Ryunosuke is a monster born in a time of violence and paranoia whose ruthlessness and murderous spirit make him valuable to the powers that be. Maybe the Shape, after all, is the reincarnation of Ryunosuke-no, the reincarnation of the maelstrom that once wore the disguise of “Ryunosuke Tsukue.”

Of course, you can draw all kinds of bizarre connections in the realm of cinema, with all its recurring tropes and motifs and what have you. 

It’s weirdly satisfying-comforting,even-to construct patterns to explain the recurrence of senseless violence across time. 

Which is funny in a sicko sort of way.

Because another thing that The Sword of Doom and Halloween’78 have in common?

They both end with their human-disguised murder machines still at large.  

It can be a harsh realm out there, people. 

It really can.