 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel, Geo here. It's very odd for me. This is something that only happens to me, I guess. I don't know if other YouTubers go through this, but sometimes when I get a high-profile release or a book from a famous person, I kind of psych myself out of reviewing the book and it sort of creates a chaos in my head of not wanting the spotlight, of possibly reviewing something that people might be interested in because there's gonna be a lot of eyes on you and wanting to do it anyways, but I recently picked up this book. Bomba by Osamu Tezuka. Tezuka is a household name. If you're a manga fan, if you know your stuff, you know how influential the mangaka was and a lot of tropes and genres can be traced back to him. So how do I begin to explain this short story? It tells the story of a young kid called Tetsu who is enamored by his homeroom teacher. To my surprise, it actually plays it a lot more straightforward and somewhat realistic in that it's just Tetsu who is obsessed with the teacher. And Mizushima, she's just trying to be a nice teacher to everybody and she's fond of Tetsu because he's a nice kid. At the start, you have Tetsu at a train station. I think the train station is located next to the school's gymnasium. That's, I didn't understand that logistic well enough, but he starts hearing this rumbling, this thunderous noise headed his way. It's not necessarily a train and he runs into the gymnasium and escapes this uncoming force and we don't necessarily know what it is at first. Turns out Tetsu is being bullied by one of the teachers and makes him do extra cleaning and it's abusive towards him and all that stuff. And right away, the force keeps popping up and Tetsu doesn't know what to think. He tells his teacher and the teacher is all nice and believes him which furthers his fascination with her in sharp contrast to his relationship with his parents back at home where you get to see them and they're not the ideal manga parents that you would think. His father is kind of a deadbeat and he drinks a lot and he tells a lot of war stories. He was a soldier and his squad, his captain, lieutenant, whatever ranking it was, was a really abusive man towards his fellow soldiers and that captain had a horse, a beautiful horse named Bomba. The horse took well to Tetsu's father and they had a really nice relationship. Eventually the horse dies in combat with the captain general, whatever, and Tetsu's father is left grieving for many years and he still misses that horse. And that sort of grief passes on and materializes as Bomba coming back as a vengeful spirit. So the thunderous clapping noise that you hear is actually the manifestation of Bomba's spirit that is still attached to Tetsu's family. But something happens that makes Tetsu harness the power of Bomba and it causes the death of certain people. Now with this strange crazy power Tetsu is sort of driven mad by it. Now he has this fascination and control over something plus it's sort of an outlet to vent his frustrations with life. One of the things about Osamu Tezuka and you'll see it a lot with scholars and other people on YouTube doing better videos than this and essays. They'll point out how metaphorical and inspiring and eye-opening all the books are because they have all these wonderful meanings and lessons on life and all that stuff. I have to be completely honest with you guys, I struggled a bit to find what I could say about this book that would make it sound impactful because even the blurb at the beginning does mention that this is sort of a master class in the writing and all that stuff and the artwork and what I came up with in my head. What I took out of this book is the idea of this kid having the ability to control this calamity, this force of nature that's now sort of this vengeful spirit. It's sort of like a giant metaphor for Tetsu's adolescence and growing up and venting his frustrations as a teenager of how unfair life is. A lot of stuff happens to the main character and he does not have any control over it and just like in real life we have zero control and we don't dictate how life is going to go. We just have to brace for impact and navigate the waters and hope for the best. Obviously with a strong will and good backing from friends, family and all that stuff but what happens when you don't have that? We see that in a character like Tetsu. He doesn't have the ideal home, he doesn't really believe in his parents, he doesn't really believe in his fellow students. There's a scene where the kids are trying to take a peep at the teacher and he blocks them from doing so but instead he gets called out for it thinking it's him that he's the peeping Tom so he's an honorable kid faced with extraordinary circumstances that force him into acting in a different way with Bomba being that catalyst, Bomba being that force I guess for expressing all of that anger out into the world. That's sort of what I took out of it. The angst of teenage rebelliousness and the angst of youth if you will is represented metaphorically through the actions of a spirit horse. So as the story progresses Tetsu gets a defining moment when the teacher has to move for Tokyo I believe it was and he is utterly devastated by this but now he has a plan to go there and potentially marry her and all this stuff but he gets set back after set back and it starts growing. The fascination with Bomba and how many others are viewing this horse causes sort of this mass hysteria that is akin to something like the war of the world's radio play which they do reference in the book and you sort of see the parallels between the two things however in this case this is sort of a spiritual thing manifesting physically and if you've ever seen in the road like I have a horse coming at you full speed and it barely evades you it's a very scary thing because it can kill you. I can't even imagine seeing a giant cloud manifesting itself into this fierce war horse strutting along right at you that must be scary and that sort of brings me to one of my weirder or negative points of the book I know a lot of people purists love anything by Tezuka but for me I was a little bit let down by the finale this is a short read it was only like 150 pages or something like that and the ending that happens was to be expected but I thought it felt a little bit rushed there's something that happens in the culminating act where the next page or two everything wraps up pretty nicely and there are little to no consequences to the actions that our main character took but instead we sort of get a realization for the character and a progression that it's fine but it's like too fast and then like they lived ever after I'm not going to say the other word just in case now one of the positive aspects of this book that I wanted to highlight on this video is the artwork Tezuka's art is world-known I'm not adding anything new to it but just to admire the intricate details of the backgrounds and how well they mesh with the cartoony character designs that Tezuka was known for as well as Bomba's fantastic otherworldly depictions make it a really interesting read there are some splash pages that look fantastic with the horse drawings and just really convey the sense of wonder and mystery behind such a calamity or force of nature I guess in summary with Bomba I don't have this epiphany or grandiose statement on it it's just a really nice small read but rather impactful and it wasn't as creepy as I thought it was going to be instead it sort of goes on this small journey of one kid's extraordinary sad and tragic life and the metaphor behind the teenage rebellion and spirit that wants to come out in all of us and how do we control it and try to live our lives as best as we can in the phase of uncertainty and tragedy and all these things that's as best as I can do