Rainbow Parakeet is a genius actor and a fantastic mimic, but also a thief. He can act out any role to the best of his... more>> abilities, while robbing the richest members of the audience during his performances. His methods are a mystery, even to the detectives charged with apprehending him: Police Inspector Senri and his daughter, Police Detective Mariko Senri. <<less

Publisher Hayakawa is celebrating its 70th anniversary with two manga anthology reprints. One collection is dedicated to mystery works while the other compiles sci-fi stories printed over the publisher's long career.... more>>

See also <<less

Still in her early twenties, beautiful Toshiko Tomura has won the Akutagawa Prize for her story “The Book of Human Insects.” The great honor is... more>> not her first: she has previously won the New York Design Academy Award, before which she was the lead actress of an established theatrical troupe. Yet, while the media go abuzz, the woman in the limelight slips away from the metropolis; what the sole paparazzo who manages to trail her to an abandoned country house witnesses is an immobile figure of an old woman and the star herself, naked, in a reverie as bizarre as it is erotic… <<less

Black Jack is a genius surgeon who never acquired his license due to his clashes with the medical establishment. He is hired out by anyone willing to pay his exorbitant rates and is perceived as a heartless rogue because of his enigmatic nature and antisocial manner but that is not the whole story.... more>>

Note: 8 previously-sealed chapters were republished and were never officially nor unofficially translated.

Won the 1st Kodansha Manga Award in the Shounen category in 1977 which was tied with . <<less

Princess Knight is a fast-paced tale of a heroic princess who can beat any man at fencing, yet is delicate and graceful enough to catch the eye of Prince Charming.... more>>

A mischief-making angel’s prank goes too far when the newborn princess of Silverland ends up with two hearts—one male and one female. Since the laws of Silverland only allow a male heir to ascend the throne, Princess Sapphire is raised as a prince. But will the avaricious Duke Duralumin discover Sapphire’s true nature and snatch the crown for his own son? <<less

Dark Horse proudly presents another of the crown jewels of international graphic fiction—Astro Boy! Created by the late Osamu Tezuka, a revered animator and cartoonist—who created over 150,000 pages of comics in his career!—and considered the Walt Disney of Japan, his Astro Boy was the first manga series to be adapted to animation and became a worldwide phenomenon, making Astro Boy the Mickey Mouse of anime—a jet-powered, super-strong, evil-robot-bashing, alien-invasion-smashing Mickey Mouse, that is! ... more>>

Exciting, whimsical, and touching, Astro Boy hearkens back to the classic era of comics and animation, featuring stories that readers young and old will enjoy. <<less

Osamu Tezuka’s vaunted storytelling genius, consummate skill at visual expression, and warm humanity blossom fully in his epic of Siddhartha’s life and times. Tezuka evidences his profound grasp of the subject by contextualizing the Buddha’s ideas; the emphasis is on movement, action, emotion, and conflict as the prince Siddhartha runs away from home, travels across India, and questions Hindu practices such as ascetic self-mutilation and caste oppression. Rather than recommend resignation and impassivity, Tezuka’s Buddha predicates enlightenment upon recognizing the interconnectedness of life, having compassion for the suffering, and ordering one’s life sensibly. Philosophical segments are threaded into interpersonal situations with ground-breaking visual dynamism by an artist who makes sure never to lose his readers’... more>> attention.

Tezuka himself was a humanist rather than a Buddhist, and his magnum opus is not an attempt at propaganda. Hermann Hesse’s novel or Bertolucci’s film is comparable in this regard; in fact, Tezuka’s approach is slightly irreverent in that it incorporates something that Western commentators often eschew, namely, humor.

Note: Won the Bungei Shunju Manga Award in 1975. Won the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material in 2004 and 2005. <<less

A graveyard in contemporary Israel has an unlikely visitor. The elderly gentleman from Japan, a former news correspondent, lays a bouquet of flowers at the tomb of one Adolf Kamil. For he remembers the tale of three Adolfs: Kamil, a Jew who grew up in Kobe, Japan, the son of a baker; Kaufmann, only child of a German consul stationed at that port city and his Japanese wife; and the Fuhrer with whom the Far Eastern nation made common cause.... more>>

Won the 10th Kodansha Manga Award for general manga in 1986 (shared with ). <<less

Michio Yuki has it all: looks, intelligence, a pedigree as the scion of a famous Kabuki family, a promising career at a major bank, legions of female admirers. But underneath the sheen of perfection lurks a secret with the power to shake the world to its foundations.... more>>

During a boyhood excursion to one of the southern archipelagos near Okinawa, Yuki barely survived exposure to a poison gas stored at a foreign military facility. The leakage annihilated all of the island’s inhabitants but was promptly covered up by the authorities, leaving Yuki as an unacknowledged witness—one whose sense of right and wrong, however, the potent nerve agent managed to obliterate.

Now, fifteen years later, Yuki is a social climber of Balzacian proportions, infiltrating the worlds of finance and politics by day while brutally murdering children and women by night—perversely using his Kabuki-honed skills as a female impersonator to pass himself off as the women he’s killed. His drive, however, will not be satiated with a promotion here and a rape there. Michio Yuki has a far more ominous objective: obtaining MW, the ultimate weapon that spared his life but robbed him of all conscience.

There are only two men with any hope of stopping him: one, a brilliant public prosecutor who struggles to build a case against the psychopath; the other, a tormented Catholic priest, Iwao Garai, who shares Yuki’ls past—and frequently his bed. <<less

The year is 1949. Crushed by the Allied Powers, occupied by General MacArthur´s armies, Japan has been experiencing massive change. Agricultural reform is dissolving large... more>> estates and redistributing plots to tenant farmer´s terrible news, if you are landowners like the archconservative Tenge family. For patriarch Sakuemon, the chagrin of one of his sons coming home alive from a P.O.W. camp instead of having died for the Emperor is topped only by the revelation that another of his is consorting with the reds. What solace does he have but his youngest Ayako, apple of his eye, at once daughter and granddaughter? <<less

A promising young doctor, Kirihito Osanai visits a remote Japanese mountain village to investigate the source of the latest medical mystery. While he ends up... more>> 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. 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 fiancee emotionally transformed by Kirihito’s mysterious disappearance; and a stranger who becomes his guardian angel, a sensual circus-act performer with volatile psychological secrets. <<less

Daigo Kagemitsu, who works for a Samurai general in Japan’s Warring States period, promises to offer body parts of his unborn baby to 48 demons in exchange for complete domination of the country. When the baby boy is born, Daigo has him thrown into a river, expecting the boy to die. A kind sage, however, finds him and adopts him. The sage fits out his poor son with prosthetics.... more>>

Time goes by and the baby grows into a boy who calls himself Hyakkimaru. Every time Hyakkimaru eliminates a demon, he retrieves one of his body parts. Hyakkimaru rescues a boy thief named Dororo from a band of men whom the young boy tried to rob. Together they travel the countryside in search of the demons who possess Hyakkimaru's parts. Throughout their travels, they face a host of monsters and ghosts.

Note: Won Best U.S. Edition of International Material - Japan in 2009. <<less

Wandering the packed tunnels of Shinjuku Station, famous author Yosuke Mikura makes a strange discovery: a seemingly homeless drunk woman who can quote French poetry.... more>> Her name is Barbara. He takes her home for a bath and a drink, and before long Barbara has made herself into Mikura's shadow, saving him from egotistical delusions and jealous enemies. But just as Mikura is no saint, Barbara is no benevolent guardian angel, and Mikura grows obsessed with discovering her secrets, tangling with thugs, sadists, magical curses and mythical beings - all the while wondering whether he himself is still sane. <<less

Long, long ago, humans lived almost the same as beasts... If you got hungry, you could just find something to kill and eat it. If... more>> someone attacked you, kill them too. Everything was kill to survive, kill to survive. Then people started acting smart and making laws. The laws kept them from doing pretty much everything they wanted to do. Beasts, on the other hand, still have no laws, or etiquette. I predict the day will come when an almost mutant breed of humans will appear, sinking to the level of beasts for freedom... Here, I will call them "Vampires..." <<less

Edo, 1855, in the Hill of the Three Hundred district: Japan's isolationist foreign policy has been lifted, and the era of the Bakumatsu has begun. The samurai Ibuya Manjiro, 26 years old, has just begun his career as low-ranking retainer to the minor daimyo Lord Matsudaira. Tezuka Ryoan, 29, a disciple of Dutch medicine, has just been accepted as a student at Teki Academy in Osaka. Each has a temper to go with his talent, and in a time of brewing upheaval the two are not slow to find trouble, which brings them together in spite of their mutual dislike. Tezuka is called in one night to sew up Ibuya after an illicit duel; a... more>> few weeks later, Ibuya finds himself the only thing standing between Tezuka and a gang of swordsmen sent by the head of medicine for the Shogunate.

Note: Won the Shogakukan Manga Award for general manga in 1984. <<less

Apollo´s Song follows the tragic journey of Shogo, a young man whose abusive childhood has instilled in him a loathing for love so profound he finds himself compelled to acts of violence when he is witness to any act of intimacy or affection whether by human or beast. His hate is such that the gods intervene, cursing Shogo to experience love throughout the ages ultimately to have it ripped from his heart every time. From the Nazi atrocities of World War II to a dystopian future of human cloning, Shogo loses his heart, in so doing, healing the psychic scars of his childhood hatred.... more>>

Volume 3 includes the oneshot Rubbish Poetry (がらくたの詩) <<less

To learn about his roots, Sharaku must investigate the mysterious ruins that a long-lost civilization called the Three-Eyed Ones bequeathed to him. In his worldwide search, which takes both him and Chiyoko Wato to locations like Arizona, Easter Island, and Mexico, Sharaku deciphers ancient scriptures and uses gadgets he invents to help solve (or start) problems and mysteries.... more>>

Sharaku is frequently bullied for his childishness, and as such the story is also about how he fights back when the x-shaped bandage that covers his third eye is removed. Behind the bandage is hidden Sharaku's malicious third eye, and the boy's hidden evil genius emerges when it can see. Sharaku's rivalries with teachers or students are occasionally developed into major plot points.

Winner of the 1st Kondansha Manga Awards (1977) in the shounen category (tied with ). <<less

This is the story of a delinquent who gives birth to a formless creature that uses a sex doll as her body.

James Block is a former sports star whose criminal endeavors landed him in jail. In prison he meets "Dr. F", a strange old man who tells James about a beam that can turn living things invisible.... more>>

After escaping from prison, James finds and uses the laser on himself. But, because the beam has not been perfected yet, it only rendered his skin invisible, leaving his insides visible to the outside. Angered at his disfigurement, James takes the name "Alabaster" and begins eliminating the hypocrites and the boastful. He is joined by Ami Ozawa, the granddaughter of "Doctor F", who was rendered invisible after the doctor used his pregnant daughter as an "F Beam" test subject.

On their trail is Rock, a vicious FBI agent. <<less

Kuuki no Soko is a collection of short stories drawn by the genius mangaka, Tezuka Osamu, between 1968 and 1970, and is known in Japan as a true masterpiece.... more>>

Belonging to Tezuka's most mature period, it touches many genres: from pure science fiction to historical fiction to contemporary drama. We find stories of industrial espionage, animal testing, and racial animosity, as well as stories about the more complex dynamics of the human mind.

And the human mind is the leitmotif of the entire volume, namely the duality present in every one of us - mercy, love, and understanding, existing together with cruelty and violence until something upsets the balance and we discover a side hidden even from ourselves... a side we are not always prepared to confront...

Note - Chapters 1 and 13 are also included in

1. The Execution Ended at Three

2. Joe's Visitor

3. The Voice of Night

4. The Cliff of Death

5. The Duel at the Grand Mesa

6. Scales Cape

7. Illicit Love

8. The Hole

9. Star for Exiles

10. The Cat's Blood

11. Telephone

12. Chameleon

13. Immaculate Conception

14. Catastrophe in the Dark

15. Robanna

16. Space Capsule <<less

Midnight is the story of a taxi driver named Shinya Mito (whose name is literally Japanese for "mid" and "night") and his various passengers, each... more>> of whom he helps in various ways. Shinya drives a taxi as a way to earn money for the treatment of a young woman named Mari, whose brain was injured sometime earlier as the result of an accident Shinya was responsible for causing. The taxi Shinya drives is equipped with a fifth wheel which makes the car more maneuverable under any kind of road conditions. <<less

The story revolves around a mysterious place called "Angel's Island" that resides somewhere on the ocean seas. Living on Angel's Island are a species of... more>> merpeople that can live in both the sea and on land. They have the form of a human, but can breath in water as well as on land. Luna is a princess of this species of mermaid living on Angel's Island, but is exiled for breaking some of their rules. As punishment, she is placed inside a sea shell, and set adrift across the sea. Meanwhile Eiji Kusahara, the son of a wealthy Japanese family, meets Soleiu (Luna's older sister) and they try to discover the mysteries behind Angel's Island. <<less

Tetsu Otani is a junior high school student with a weak heart. Despite the hardships of being so meek at school, he has an intense crush on one of his teachers: Reiko Mizushima. However, one of his least favorite teachers, Kito, intends to propose to her. Since Kito is very violent and often pushes Tetsu around, the thought of him and Reiko together infuriates Tetsu. Before him appears a ghostly white horse, and the next day, Kito is found dead.... more>>

Tetsu realizes that this horse is the ghost of Bomba, a horse Tetsu's father told him he was charged to take care of during the Pacific War. Now, whenever Tetsu feels intense hatred for someone, Bomba will appear and cause that person to die.

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Also includes the 1972 oneshot, "Ma no Yama" or "Devil's Mountain" at the end of the volume as a bonus. <<less

The Melody of Iron: Dan Takuya has both of his arms severed and is left for dead. He learns to control new arms made of iron with telekinesis and goes out for revenge.... more>>

Included stories:

- White Phantom

- Revolution <<less

The story begins with a scientist, Dr. Yorkshire Bell, noting that dinosaurs flourished and became extinct when they advanced beyond their ability to adapt to... more>> change. Giant mammals, such as the saber-toothed tiger and the mammoth, came and went the same way <<less