Themes of Akira
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| Kaneda and Tetsuo |
Akira covers many different themes over its long story. What I find the most fascinating is that the themes get more serious as you go along; much like adolescence and adulthood. Kaneda and his biker buddies just want to race around Neo-Tokyo, pop some pills, and occasionally get laid. Nothing too out of the ordinary there. But the moment Tetsuo's bike crashes into a strange boy with 26 tattooed on his hand, their lives become increasingly more complicated, and their problems only get worse from there. One thing that you have to pay attention to when reading Akira is growth. What does each character grow into, and how is it different from what they were when the novel started?
While trying not to spoil too much, each main character in the book goes through some event where they must confront something that is bigger than them. In order to accomplish this task, they are asked to go above and beyond their physical limitations in order to succeed. Kaneda, Tetsuo, Kei, Lady Miyako, and even Akira himself all face something that is more powerful than they ever imagined, and how they react to these situations frame the story and what happens inside of it.
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| Imagery is incredible in the comic. People who have a love for artwork should definitely read it just for the eye candy. |
The second main theme you would have to consider is power, and what it does to people who wield it. One main quote you can get from the motion picture is the one where the Espers are using Kei to talk to Kaneda, where they mention what would happen if an insect was able to gain the intelligence of a human, and what that would mean. Akira, Takashi, Kiyoko, Masaru, and Tetsuo are all given these amazing powers, and they all treat them differently. Each person seems to accept their place in what their powers truly mean, and while Tetsuo uses his abilities for fear and control, the others seem to try their best to distance themselves from what they have. We'll get into why that is later on down the road.
Speaking of control, this is the third and final main theme that you should consider when reading Akira. This is often an overlooked theme in the novel, but make no mistake, the entire book deals with control and what people will do to obtain it and what they will do to hang onto it. Control can be seen in almost every panel of the comic. Kaneda controls his gang of friends at the beginning, but Tetsuo wants to branch out and carve his own piece of history. The Colonel wants to control the Espers and the power they possess, but they just want to be able to control their own lives. The terrorists want control of their government, and the government is trying to control the terrorists in order to do their bidding behind closed doors. See what I mean? The later chapters deal with control even more thoroughly, but again, I don't want to spoil too much of what is going to happen down the road.
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| The power of Akira |
Neo-Tokyo is About to EXPLODE
Neo-Tokyo is the setting of this piece, and like I said in the previous post, it's one of the most vivid cities you will ever see in a comic book. Japan in the 80s was seen as the technological leaders in the world market, and their gadgets and cars soon poured into the States at an alarming rate. Nintendo, Sony, and Honda all made a huge chunk of their money off North American sales, and with so much Japanese hardware laying around, it was easy to picture this country as a place where the future met the present. Akira is built off this premise, but with one catch, this Japan is built from the ashes of an attack that decimated Tokyo. Without warning, and explosion rocks the entire city, leveling most of it, and causing WWIII in the process. Foreign countries see this as an attack and use the tension of the Cold War to finally engage in the battle that never was. 30 some years after the bomb went off, Neo-Tokyo now stands, still thriving even after the attack, much like Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Street gangs seem to have overtaken the city, and lawlessness is everywhere. The schools are run down, and most of the kids grow up in homes for neglected children. All the while, there is still a slick sheen to the entire city, and it's neon still fills the skyline at night. While the kids race around on their state of the art bikes, they still don't seem to be able to get ahead in life all that much. While the ceiling is incredibly high, the road to get there seems almost impossible for our protagonists, at least at the beginning of the novel.
While Neo-Tokyo does get leveled and changed around in the film, it's nowhere near the level that it went through in the manga. Neo-Tokyo turns from the post-WWIII beacon of hope to something out of Mad Max about halfway through the book, and it's important to notice that the entire city is always the focus of the conversation in the latter part of the piece.
Neo-Tokyo is as essential to the novel as Akira himself. Without it, the story wouldn't be as impactful, because you have to consider the entire history of Japan when looking at Neo-Tokyo. Considering that Japan had already gone through a horrible nuclear attack, something like the damage done at the beginning of the book makes you think back to those pictures and videos they show you in high school of the dropping of the bomb. It's crazy to think that a power like that would be unleashed onto people and they would be able to survive, but Japan did, and flourished. Much like that, the residents of Neo-Tokyo witness an ungodly power rain down on them, and they have to learn how to survive afterward.
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| Power does strange things to people. |
GETTING READY FOR VOL 1.
If you are interested in reading Akira yourself, a copy can be easily attained. Local libraries are great for reading manga these days, and if they don't have it, you can always try an interlibrary loan. That's of course if you want to read the book for free. If you would like to own a copy of it yourself, you can find it on Amazon. It's not badly priced, and if you space out buying the volumes, you can actually save some money when buying. There are places you can easily read it digitally online, but I wouldn't suggest it on your first reading. The artwork is bar none, and some of that will be lost if you are trying to read it on your phone screen or a computer.
There aren't many books I would suggest before reading Akira, but if you are looking at the novel as a whole, it's always a good idea to look towards the things that help inspire the manga, as well as pieces that it may have impacted after it's publication. Star Wars, Ghost in the Shell, and Strange Things are movies and TV shows that seem to have a similar tone and atmosphere to a lot of what you see in Akira, particularly people being able to do extraordinary feats. Another movie that people point to is Chronicle, although this would be more along the lines of the film, and not so much the book.
When looking for comics that have the same feel as Akira, you may have some difficulty. The book far exceeded what expectations people had of it when it came out in the early 80s, and with it encompassing so many genres, it can be hard to pin it down to one style to look for. One manga that always comes to mind when I think of Akira is Fist of the North Star. The story is vaguely similar to the latter part of Akira, and it was written and published around the same time, so I think those are some reasons why.
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| Sometimes, dialogue isn't needed, especially if you can convey what you want with ingenuity. |
Nothing is really going to prepare you for Akira the manga. Even the film, as massive and complicated as it is, is nowhere near as immersive as the novel alone. But one shouldn't feel intimidated when getting ready to undertake Akira. It's honestly a fast read, even with the size, mostly because it's an engaging story, and you can probably polish off a couple of volumes a day if you are in the zone.
NEXT: AKIRA PART 3: AKIRA VOL 1. TETSUO/CONTROL, AND WHO IS REALLY CONTROLLING WHO/COME WITH ME NOW, AND ACCEPT WHAT YOU ARE/KANEDA AND TETSUO
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