Two doctors, the young, passionate and well-liked Osanai and the veteran, ambitious Tatsugaura, are both investigating the mysterious 'Monmow' disease, found only in one remote village, which causes bizarre bone deformation, making its victims take on a beastlike appearance before their deaths. Osanai is sent to the village by Tatsugaura to see if he can find a cause for the disease while also treating the victims to the best of his ability. But in reality, Tatsugaura is scheming against Osanai and intends to infect him with the disease in order to clear the way of any obstacles of presenting his own research, and thus gaining high prestige and rank in the medical world.

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. 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’s past—and frequently his bed. (Source: Vertical)

Opening a few years after the end of World War II and covering almost a quarter-century, here is comics master Osamu Tezuka’s most direct and sustained critique of Japan’s fate in the aftermath of total defeat. Unusually devoid of cartoon premises yet shot through with dark voyeuristic humor, Ayako looms as a pinnacle of Naturalist literature in Japan with few peers even in prose, the striking heroine a potent emblem of things left unseen following the war. 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 estates and redistributing plots to tenant farmers—terrible news, if you’re 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? (Source: Kodansha USA)

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 psychological scars of his childhood hatred. (Source: Kodansha USA) *Note: The Japanese version of this manga includes the one-shot "Garakuta no Uta", however the English release does not contain this story.*

"Human Metamorphosis," a satirical Manga depicting human society compared to the insect world, focuses on the life of a devious woman. Tomura Toshiko, who is said to be a genius, is a rising star writer. Her novel wins the Akutagawa Prize for the best novel of the year. While she attends the award ceremony, another woman named Usuba Kageri commits suicide in another place. It turns out that Kageri and Toshiko used to live together, and the awarded novel was copied from Kageri's transcript. Toshiko is like a parasite: approaching talented people one after another, squeezing everything out of them and stealing their works for her own fame. Behind her success story, she has her secrets.

Wandering the packed tunnels of Shinjuku Station, famous author Yosuke Mikura makes a strange discovery: a ragged hippie who can quote French poetry. 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 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. Written in 1973 and 1974 and inspired by the classic opera “Tales of Hoffmann” by Jacques Offenbach, Barbara may be Tezuka’s most psychological and unsettling work, shattering the fine line between art and madness with masterful precision. (Source: DMP)

In the future, birds have taken over Earth and replaced human kind as the dominant species. With the assistance of bird-like aliens, the birds of Earth gained increased intelligence and began to attack humans. Now humans are treated as livestock by the birds who have moved on to create their own society with laws, currency, countries, and class systems. Ironically, the birds are following the same path as humans did. Now, the meat-eating predatorial birds and the insect and grain eating birds have begun a war amongst each other that has no end in sight. As they fight, aliens begin to consider what species should replace the birds as the dominant species of Earth in this science fiction thriller.

Osamu Tezuka unleashes several creepy suspenseful short stories in this anthology of speculative fiction spanning the years of 1968 thru 1973. When a Nazi lieutenant is sentenced to death for war crimes, he expects to escape with his life, but hubris is his downfall. A female android marries for love but is soon lost, and she must deal with the consequences. After a married man finds out his city is being experimented on, he tries to save the people while struggling with adulterous thoughts. On a dark and lonely road, a cabby picks up a shady man who threatens him, but little does his passenger know the cabby is not as he seems. An educated man falls in love with an elusive woman who has a life altering secret. American school kids learn the cruelty of war. A revolutionary fails his revolution, and an interstellar peace conference does not yield the hoped for results when space hippies defy peace conventions. These eerie stories will leave one wandering the depths of despair and hope against all odds. (Source: DMG)

From science fiction, historical fiction, to contemporary drama, Under the Air includes a variety of tales that depict the duality of man—good and evil; loving and violent. An injured white-supremacist struggles with the fact that he was brought back to life by a black organ donor; a young man in the wild west seeks revenge for his father’s murder; an escaped convict holds a family hostage in a cave that causes hallucinations; the only two survivors of a nuclear apocalypse dare to explore the outside world—Tezuka’s characters are put to the test when the delicate balance of their minds are disrupted, discovering something dark hidden deep within themselves. Don’t miss this uncommon, unheard, unusual, out-of-the-ordinary collection of short stories by the late, great Osamu Tezuka. (Source: DMP)

Amidst the chaos of World War II, two Japanese sailors hear of Zephyrus, an utterly captivating woman in the South Pacific. Many years have since passed, and now Zephyrus has resurfaced in Japan, wielding her mysterious power over all men to exact revenge for their crimes against women since the beginning of time. Gohonmatsu Seki is the only man with the ability to resist her allure, but even he seems ill-equipped to save his gender… (Source: DMP)

Once a famous athlete, now an infamous villain, James Block seeks revenge against all things “beautiful.” After he’s arrested and convicted for assaulting his girlfriend who insulted his appearance, he meets a mad scientist in prison who tells him of the ‘F Laser’ he invented that can turn any carbon based organism invisible. When James finishes his prison term, he finds the ‘F Laser’ and points it on himself, however the imperfect laser beam leaves him disfigured with only his skin invisible. On a vicious revenge spree, he takes the nom de guerre of Alabaster and is joined by Ami, the granddaughter of the scientist who experimented on his pregnant daughter and left Ami fully invisible. Together they pull off several heists, but Ami’s innocence may cause Alabaster’s downfall… (Source: DMP)

1. **Peter Kyulten no Kiroku** (The Record of Peter Kyulten) Peter Kürten, a former prisoner-of-war, forms an idealistic couple with his wife and is a devoted unionist at meetings. In actuality he is a sexually perverted serial killer nicknamed the Vampire of Düsseldorf who taunts the police with escalating murders. After one of the murders, the police force a fake confession from another man, causing Peter to angrily reveal the truth to his wife, who gives him up to the police. At trial it is revealed that Peter is actually a criminal with a history of incest, bestiality, arson, and murder. When his lawyer tries to defend him by claiming madness, Peter angrily exclaims that his actions are revenge against the bourgeois. Peter is executed by guillotine. (Tezuka based the story on the work of Shunsuke Tsurumi) 2. **Monouge na Yoru** (Sensual Nights) A wealthy Japanese playboy visits Vietnam to seduce a woman who has supposedly stopped aging while waiting for her sweetheart who was taken away by soldiers. As he is in the middle of preparing to have sex with her, his contact tells him that the woman's man was taken away by the Japanese army during the Pacific War, causing a deep hatred of Japanese people in her. He panics, but recovers when the woman reacts by offering him her body. When she fights back against his attempts at intimacy, he tells her that her lover is likely dead and forces himself on her. The man then sees a sight of a wrinkled old woman that startles him so much he jumps out of the window. The woman he had seduced was actually the daughter of the unaging woman and her sweetheart, and his contact was her fiancé. 3. **Mogami-dono Shimatsu** (Lord Iechika Mogami) Piipii, a meager farmer, dreams of being a samurai so he can support his wife and their four children. One day he is employed by a lord to be his double, and Piipii's family is secretly killed. Piipii trains to be a lord, grooming and dressing himself to be the spitting image of the lord. As a test, the lord tells him to give the order to open the castle gates. Piipii rides back to visit his family, only to learn about their deaths. On the lord's wedding day, his double is supposed to replace him during the wedding ceremony to protect him from any attempts on his life. During the switch, Piipii murders the lord and consummates the marriage with the lady Sasa instead. When she learns of his identity, the lady has an affair with a syphilitic beggar, and kills herself. The disease spreads to Piipii and Sasa gets her revenge. 4. **Rhine no Yakata nite** (The Lay of the Rhine) A Japanese woman accompanies her husband on a business trip to Düsseldorf. She catches him having an affair, and when she confronts him, he leaves her. As she desperately searches for him in the streets, the woman is hit by a car and is hospitalized for a month. When she recovers, she visits her benefactor Lady Rathwood, the owner of a castle they had visited earlier. As she lives with Lady Rathwood, the woman learns of her hatred for men and her hatred for her husband is kindled. One day she discovers that the car she was hit with belongs to Lady Rathwood and she witnesses Lady Rathwood taking off the disguise of the woman who seduced her husband. Lady Rathwood calls her husband to the castle and gives the woman a knife, telling her to take her revenge. The woman refuses and goes back to her husband. 5. **Hi no Yama** (Fire Mountain/The Thief Inoue Akikazu) Time is during the Second World War. The roughing Inoue Showa went to the Sobetsu village in Hokkaido, became an assistant of Mr. Masao Mimatsu, an observer of Showa Shinzan, which rapidly generated. The description that Mikami lived for the observation and protection of Showa Shinzan was based on a true story. (Sources: Wikipedia & osamutezuka.net, edited)