Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun

In this chapter, Ria Taketomi spotlights another Japanese manga icon: Astro Boy, a comic series on a robot boy, Atom, written by Osamu Tezuka. Offering an overview of the robot boom stages in post-war Japan, Taketomi traces the embryonic development of Astro Boy, the impact of WWII on young Tezuka’s creativity, and his magnetic stimuli to subsequent world-renowned film directors, including Stanley Kubrick. Furthermore, she provides a series of arguments about the influences of Astro Boy on Ishiguro’s novels, especially Klara and the Sun, in terms of descriptive echoes, the similarity of the human characters’ poignant condition of having a robot around after losing a child, and the sacrifice the innocent robots make to save their human friends, with the motif of the sun in the foreground. Taketomi paved the way for interdisciplinary studies of the relationship between Ishiguro and Japanese manga culture.