We’re not always in control. Even when it looks like we have the powers of the gods at our command, it’s provisional. Nature, fate, and mankind too, all have their ways of getting their due.

I don’t want to make it sound like the main lesson to be learned in the second volume of Black Jack is “Give up”—it’s not, and Osamu Tezuka makes that clear time and again. But he also makes it clear that it’s not wise to equate absolute power with absolute control. You can’t stop nature from running its course in its own way—sometimes all you can do is stand back and let things happen, and it takes a wise man to know when to stand back. And sometimes it hurts like hell to do so.

If you haven’t read the series yet, Black Jack’s central premise—an unlicensed surgeon, an apparently amoral figure who can perform miracles for six- and seven-digit sums—probably sounds like a setup for stories where the biggest tests are the limits of the protagonist’s skills. That’s just the setup—the springboard that Tezuka uses to propel us into his universe of difficult moral and ethical choices. There’s one moment in this volume where Black Jack performs a delicate bit of surgery in complete darkness, and it’s not because he’s showing off: he’s trying to engineer a solution to a dilemma that has no easy solution.