Alabaster

At the end of Alabaster’s last chapter, I glimpsed upon Tezuka’s notes about the story itself. In truth he didn’t actually like the story and several characters. He was uncomfortable with how dark the story turned out and how discrimination in the story was handled. If he did not agree to let his entire anthology be printed, Alabaster would only appear once and disappear.

Personally, despite Tezuka’s disdain for the tragic ending and characters, I find the tragic ending most beautiful. Tesuka was known to draw manga for younger audience, hence the round, lighthearted characters puts greater emphasis on cruelness of certain characters. 

To recap, Alabaster is a story about a young Black athlete call James Block, who went to prison because he got heart broken and went mad. He is overtaken by rage and the desire to take revenge. He met a mad scientist who invented a ray that turns people invisible. With the desire to turn invisible and take revenge on his ex, Block shot himself with the laser but only turned semi-transparent because the laser was actually a failure. All his skin turned invisible to reveal his internal organs, Turing him into a monster instead of invisible. Block renamed himself Alabaster and went on to kill any beautiful hypocrite. He got back to the doctor and discovered that the daughter he experimented on died, but gave birth to an invisible baby called Ami. Alabaster approaches Ami and begin to use her for his dark purposes.

Essentially, the story is about Ami. The readers emphasized with Block at first due to the racism he experienced and heartbreak, but once he became Alabaster, he became a passive villain when Ami comes into the story. The readers empathize with the little bullied invisible girl who just want to be normal. Especially when Tezuka drew her  like a classic shoji heroine, she is simply a cute character that we want to root for. From the second to last quarter of the story, Ami’s goal is just to be seen and given importance, in which Alabaster gave her to make her stay with him. 

Another funny thing is the two characters that drive the story, Gen and Rock, were disliked by Tesuka to the point that he forced himself to draw them. Rock was a classic shounen protagonist type boy that became Ami’s voice of true happiness. He is the character that tries to stop Ami from committing crimes with Alabaster and live a happy simple life. Although he appears to be stubborn, selfish and full of life, he sacrificed himself to help Ami escape in the end, enhancing the tragedy of the ending. Rock on the other hand has the face of a shoujo heroine but a nasty personality of a bully in police uniform. He chases after Ami not for law but his own amusement. The way that Tesuka uses visually use the character tropes of confident shounen protagonist and sweet heroine on Gen and Rock makes the acting of these two characeters way more exciting-because the readers cannot predict if they are going to follow the visual trope or not. Despite Tesuka’s hatred for those two characters, I think they were extremely essential to the tragedy at the end. Despite the sacrifice of Gen and defeating Rock, Ami still choose to jump of the hot air balloon to end her life because she could not live with her past crimes. The last scene when her brother saw her as an angel jumping down to earth gives a satisfying yet tragic conclusion to the story. Ami was finally seen, but through her death.