Word: akanemaru
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...bear he unleashes a savagely violent revenge that begins his days as a hunted, merciless bandit. And yet, in a moment that I missed on the first read, during a breathless chase scene, he puts a ladybug out of harm's way. During his travels Gao crosses paths with Akanemaru, a sculptor on his way to visit a temple. Akanemaru shares his campfire, a kindness that Gao returns with a hateful crippling of the "proud" sculptor's arm. From here the book switches back and forth between the lives of both men. They will meet twice more, fulfilling separate...
...first devastated by his loss, Akanemaru finds the inner strength to continue his work while convalescing at a Buddhist monastery. Soon a powerful prefect "commissions" him, under the threat of death, to sculpt the legendary Phoenix. Given three years to accomplish this, Akanemaru begins a quest to find the bird. Meanwhile Gao falls in love with a Baya, a woman who appears from nowhere and becomes his captive. When Gao gets an infection of the nose (it balloons to resemble a hideous eggplant in a typical bit of Tezuka humor) he mistakenly believes Baya to be the cause...
...begins Gao's slow reformation. Upon learning of the wheel of karma, wherein the things we do in this life affect our reincarnated form in the next, Gao travels Japan as a wandering monk's acolyte. Along the way he discovers his own talent for sculpting. Meanwhile Akanemaru has a vision of the Phoenix, a bird who represents the eternal reborning of all life. His carving of the bird earns him a commission from the emperor to oversee the construction of a giant Buddha. Eventually, after many more twists, Gao and Akanemaru meet for the last time in a contest...
...Akanemaru struggles to carve a Boddhisatva...
...also be the supreme master of dynamic yet readable layouts - a talent that reaches its pinnacle in "Karma." No two pages have the same design. Particularly frenetic sequences inhabit small, jagged panels that work like a strobe light on an action too fast for the eye to see. When Akanemaru despairs of finding the Phoenix he sits at the bottom of tall, full-length panels that make him seem tiny. But much of this will go unnoticed the first time through. Your eye dances through the pages like a supple partner to Fred Astaire's lead...
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