Dis­cov­er this post­mod­ern, man­ga-inspired med­i­ta­tion on authorship

Fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of his ground­break­ing New Trea­sure Island in 1947 which ush­ered in the Gold­en Age of man­ga, Osamu Tezu­ka would, with his pop­u­lar series like AstroBoy, Princess Knight and Kim­ba the White Lion, become known var­i­ous­ly as the ​‘father’, the ​‘god­fa­ther’ and even the ​‘god’ of the form over the next two decades, while also pro­duc­ing pio­neer­ing work in ani­mé for television.

Yet the oeu­vre of Tezu­ka was, much like that of his clos­est Amer­i­can coun­ter­part Walt Dis­ney, close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with chil­dren. As his read­er­ship grew up, they yearned for more mature mate­r­i­al, and from the late ​’60s, Tezu­ka would start engag­ing with the now decade-old alter­na­tive geki­ga move­ment which pro­duced man­ga with more adult themes. This would yield long series from Tezu­ka like Phoenix, Black Jack and Bud­dha, as well as many short­er runs, includ­ing Barbara.

In Japan, this live-action film adap­ta­tion shared its title with the orig­i­nal graph­ic nov­el (ばるぼら), but it has been renamed for the Eng­lish-speak­ing world as Tezuka’s Bar­bara – a title which explic­it­ly rais­es issues of author­ship. Much as Wes Craven was not just the direc­tor but also a char­ac­ter of the same name in the care­ful­ly titled self-reflex­ive sequel Wes Craven’s New Night­mare, Tezuka’s Bar­bara is drawn from a work by Osamu Tezu­ka but direct­ed by his son Maco­to Tezu­ka. Telling­ly, it is also con­cerned with anoth­er author’s strug­gles to find a new voice.

Yosuke Miku­ra (Goro Ina­ga­ki) is a young writer whose work has made him a celebri­ty, but unlike his con­tem­po­rary Hiroyu­ki Yot­suya (Kiy­ohiko Shibukawa) he is not win­ning any lit­er­ary awards, and wor­ries that his recent reliance on sex­u­al themes is reduc­ing his writ­ing to trashy sen­sa­tion­al­ism, devoured by read­ers but just as quick­ly for­got­ten. Still, sport­ing his shades at night and even in his apart­ment, Yosuke has all the hip­ster swag­ger and arro­gant aloof­ness of youth.

When he runs into drunk, down-and-out Bar­bara (Fumi Nikai­do) in an under­pass, Yosuke is sur­prised to hear her slur a quo­ta­tion from Ver­laine, and even more sur­prised to dis­cov­er, after invit­ing this filthy, mal­odor­ous woman back to his immac­u­late apart­ment for more drinks, that she is both a read­er and a crit­ic of his books. ​“They’re too neat,” she com­plains, and soon Bar­bara will be mess­ing up Yosuke’s home, life and work, all as part of a mys­tic jour­ney to become a bet­ter, or at least a dif­fer­ent, writer.

Reflect­ed in all this, one can see Tezuka’s own anx­ious attempts to change lit­er­ary direc­tion and embrace geki­ga. Bar­bara declares a sex scene that Yosuke has just writ­ten ​“lame”, ​“bor­ing as hell” and ​“total garbage”, warn­ing that, ​“It’ll go straight to the used book store!” In two sur­re­al sequences, Bar­bara also inter­rupts Yosuke’s attempts at actu­al sex, reveal­ing one of his lovers to be mere­ly a store man­nequin, and anoth­er (Mina­mi) to be a pet dog.

In this meta­mor­phic world, eros is exposed as both illu­so­ry and elu­sive, and no soon­er has Yosuke begun a sex­u­al rela­tion­ship with Bar­bara than he is told by her moth­er (Eri Watan­abe), an occult-obsessed deal­er in antique goods, that until the two lovers are mar­ried, they must stay apart from one anoth­er. In fact, from behind the scenes, Bar­bara steers Yosuke’s career in oth­er ways too, appar­ent­ly using voodoo not only to bring to an end his flir­ta­tion with polit­i­cal entan­gle­ments as a route to suc­cess, but also to remove the influ­ence of his inter­fer­ing agent Kanako Kai (Shizu­ka Ishibashi).

Bar­bara is not just Yosuke’s inspi­ra­tion but evi­dent­ly a Muse in the more lit­er­al sense. Her moth­er is actu­al­ly named Mnemosyne, and they both engage in cultish rit­u­als and dis­play pecu­liar mag­i­cal pow­ers. The only oth­er char­ac­ter in the film who seems even to notice Barbara’s pres­ence is anoth­er artist, a club singer (Issay) who was her pre­vi­ous lover. Oth­er­wise, she remains hid­den from every­one besides Yosuke and her moth­er, and in the end the view­er is uncer­tain whether this mys­te­ri­ous fig­ure is any­thing more than a char­ac­ter Yosuke has been invent­ing as a rad­i­cal depar­ture from his usu­al fic­tive preoccupations.

Tezuka’s Bar­bara is a film about the cre­ative process – about the trans­for­ma­tion of feel­ings of love and loss, angst and oth­er­ness (Barbara’s name means ​‘for­eign woman’) into art, and the final des­ti­na­tion of Yosuke’s strange, trans­gres­sive excur­sion is his next book, with ​‘Bar­bara’ as both sub­ject and title. Yet Bar­bara, eva­sive and enig­mat­ic, no more belongs to Yosuke than to either Tezu­ka. Rather she is an obscure object of desire, and a spur to ​“new things”.

Focus­ing heav­i­ly on the con­tri­bu­tion, both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive, made to art by drink­ing, Tekuza’s Bar­bara is woozi­ly shot by Christo­pher Doyle, with reel­ing angles, lurid colours, and parts of the screen often out of focus. There is also a heavy noir inflec­tion to the pro­ceed­ings, with Yosuke as the melan­cholic chump and Bar­bara the femme fatale, play­ing out their doomed, self-con­sum­ing love affair beneath neon lights to the strains of a jazz soundtrack.

Made by Tez­ka to coin­cide with the 90^th anniver­sary of his late father’s birth, this is a man­nered, mean­der­ing trip through a writer’s mind, and a dif­fi­cult reimag­in­ing of an already dif­fi­cult work. Yet if the orig­i­nal man­ga, with all its vio­lence and misog­y­ny and abuse, was very much a prod­uct of the ​’70s, Tezu­ka updates type­writ­ers to com­put­ers and pay phones to mobiles, only revert­ing to old­er times in Mnemosyne’s antiques store, her cul­tic church and in the final for­est sequence, stripped of all work­ing technology.

Like Tezu­ka, Yosuke is draw­ing on the past, and on ancient, pri­mal urges and taboos (even mad­ness, necrophil­ia and can­ni­bal­ism), to inspire his present work. The result is an echo­ing hall of masks and mir­rors, and a post­mod­ern para­ble of art in the mak­ing and remaking.

Tezuka’s Bar­bara is avail­able on dual for­mat all-region DVD and Blu-ray via Third Win­dow Films from 28 June.