Kazuo Umezu passed away last week, although the news has only recently come out. If you have any fascination with the grotesque and have never had the pleasure of reading his works, you must: His manga The Drifting Classroom and My Name Is Shingo are straight up fantastic, the former getting a baffling movie adaptation from the director of House. If you are a Junji Ito stan, know that he is by far the greatest influence on him.
But no single work of his has made such an impact on me as his series Fourteen, a sprawling, nightmarish vision of the world generally and America specifically that cannot be easily summarized and has never received an official translation. Though I said it is impossible to summarize Fourteen, I will try to mention things that happen in it. It is the 23rd century. Animals do not exist in their natural form any more, and zoos are filled with horrifying chimeras. Meat is grown in vats, and out of one of those vats emerges a sentient chicken breast that grows into a body, a chicken-man. This chicken man becomes a doctor, and goes by the name Doctor Chicken George.
Doctor Chicken George becomes a Doctor Moreau-like figure, an avenging angel who describes himself as a representative of the animal kingdom. Meanwhile, children are being born with green hair and bodies, including the child of the president of the USA, who names his child America. At one point a briefcase is opened and a Tyrannosaurus Rex jumps out of it. All the trees die and the government gets the grandson of the writer of Die Hard to distract people with TV while they replant Central Park with plastic replicas. The mummy of Jesus Christ is discovered, but turns out to be a demon. All the air in Nepal disappears. I am skipping past a lot of things, and this barely covers the first half of the manga.
In a career of recreating pubescent nightmares, Fourteen stands singularly as perhaps one of Umezu’s weirdest and most political. It jumps wildly from plot point to plot point, but the tone is intentionally humorous. It is a work that is deeply critical of mankind’s hatred and indifference to nature broadly and America’s role in the wholesale destruction of the planet specifically. It is a fever dream, and while you can debate that it is not coherent, its moral compass points clearly.
I would love to say that I bought Fourteen legally, but that’s not possible. It has never been translated and released legally, but it should be, because it’s one of the damnedest things I have ever read. A single panel stays more vividly than other works of art, the piercing gaze of Doctor Chicken George staring at the reader, having gained sentience after being told that his purpose is to be eaten. “I was born for no one.”
RIP to one of the best that ever lived. I hope one day this work gets its due.
