I nearly screwed up my journey home. I had assumed that my flight was in the night, just like my colleague’s was, a couple of weeks ago. The plan was to come to office on Monday morning and bid farewell to my colleagues. Happened to glance at the time on my tickets on Sunday night, and gah – the flight was at 2:15 in the day. Take into account the fact I would have to be present at the airport 3 hours before the check-in time ( I had excess baggage – yes, haha, I know ) and that Monday morning was peak traffic time on the freeway, getting to the office was out of the question. Took several deep breaths to calm self down. Man, if I hadn’t double-checked, I would have been stranded. Phew.

Check-in went by completely bereft of incident, major or minor. The person behind the counter didn’t even blink when I hefted the three pieces of baggage onto the scale – not even at the fact that all of them were on the higher side of the 32-kilo limit. I took out two of the heavier bits of my handbaggage, the mammoth Ode To Kirohito and the two volume Finder/Keeper collection before putting it onto the weighing machine, it came to 7.98 kgs. The limit was 7. The guy waved me in. Whew!

Again, fairly uneventful flight, marked by the successful reading and rereading of Ode To Kirohito, a 788 page medical manga that blows the previous Tezuka works I’ve read ( Buddha and Astro Boy ) out of the water. From what I had been hearing about it, this is more of gekiga than Tezuka’s all-ages stuff, marked by a lot of adult content and Christian symbolism. Turned out to be just that. What I had assumed was the way the book would end turned out to be addressed by Tezuka in the first 200 pages. It then proceeds in a direction that – goddamnit, I don’t want to ruin this for any of you, but rest assured it ends on a note halfway between upbeat and bittersweet.

Oh, and also read Finder and Keeper, Greg Rucka’s Atticus Kodiak novels, which The Flatmate got at the grand price of a dollar at a clearance sale. Effing excellent!

Born Under A Lucky Star Department: The Asian Art Museum in San Franciso was the exclusive US venue for an Osamu Tezuka retrospective exhibit. It started on June 2 and I went there on June 9th. Pictures were not allowed inside the exhibit, so instead I hung around the exhibit for about 5 hours. Amazing, amazing experience. Sample black and white pages from all of Tezuka’s major series, Phoenix, Melmo, Buddha, Blackjack, Kirohito, Astro Boy ( obviously! ), Apollo, Metropolis, Vampire, Crime and Punishment, Princess Knight. Coloured endpapers and chapter frontispieces from some of them, and gigantic facsimile pages ( which I didn’t particularly enjoy). The best part about the exhibit was the way it gave an insight into Tezuka’s growth as an artist – the creative use of the splash pages in works like Melmo, the detailed crosshatching in his later works, the increasingly adult-oriented stories he did as he progressed from being the pioneer of Japanese comics to The God of Manga. I also spent an agonizing half an hour in the museum store drooling over Tezuka prints. A day well spent.