Part 21: The Man Who Was Tetsuwan Atom: Frederik Schodt and the Author Nobody Names

Twenty essays of decisions. A lawyer changed a letter and made a swordsman a master number. A distributor cut twenty minutes out of Nausicaä. Somebody looked at a rice ball and typed "jelly-filled donut." Somebody chose "Believe it!" because dattebayo means nothing and English has no slot for a meaningless noise. Somebody left keikaku in the line and explained it in yellow across the top of the frame.

Every one of those was a person. On a deadline. Making a judgment call with imperfect information, usually for not much money, usually with no way to know they were making the decision the internet would still be laughing at twenty years later.

And you cannot name one of them. Neither could I, without going and looking.

The Craft That Succeeds by Vanishing

Translation is the only art I can think of whose success condition is the absence of evidence that it happened.

A good translation is called invisible, transparent, it reads like it was written in English — and those are the compliments, offered sincerely, and they all mean: I could not detect you. The better the work, the less of it you can see. Perfect success is indistinguishable from the text having arrived by itself.

Which produces a brutal asymmetry. The only time a translator becomes visible is when they fail. "Believe it!" is famous. The jelly donut is famous. Zolo is famous. Nobody is famous for the ten thousand lines in that same volume that landed exactly right, because landing exactly right is silence. The public record of this profession is a list of its worst moments, curated by people who do not know what the job is.

And it is a genuinely enormous job. Every problem in this series lands on one desk. The translator has to decide whether to keep the honorific (Part 7) and, if they drop it, engineer an English ladder that can carry chapter 201's earthquake. They have to render twenty pronouns with one word (Part 14) and invent an idiolect to compensate, and then sustain it for two hundred chapters. They have to write a new joke where the pun died (Part 15). They have to decide whether "Uzumaki" gets a gloss (Part 20). They have to fit it in forty-two characters (Part 17). And they have to do all of it this week, because the chapter ships Monday.

It is authorship. Every one of those is a creative decision that changes what the reader experiences, and there is no algorithm for any of them, and the person doing it gets a credit in six-point type on the indicia page.

Schodt

Which brings me to the one who is not invisible, and who got that way by doing something stranger than translating.

Frederik Schodt grew up partly in Japan, went back, and in the 1970s fell in with a group of people trying to bring Japanese comics into English at a time when there was no industry, no audience, no vocabulary, and no reason to think it would ever work. He became Osamu Tezuka's interpreter and friend. He translated Tezuka. He translated Ghost in the Shell. He worked, early, on the effort to get Barefoot Gen — Nakazawa's account of Hiroshima — into English, which is one of the more important things anybody in this trade has done.

And in 1983 he published Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, with a foreword by Tezuka.

That book did not translate a work. It translated the medium. It walked into an English-speaking world that thought comics were for children and Japan was a place that made cars, and it argued — patiently, with evidence, in 1983 — that there was an entire literature over here, adult and enormous and worth your attention. Everything downstream of it, including this website, is standing on that argument.

So the most visible translator in the history of English-language manga became visible by writing a book about the thing he translated. He did not escape the invisibility of the craft. He went around it.

The Coincidence I Have to Report

I ran his name because Part 1 was about Tezuka's robot and I wanted the man who carried it across.

Tetsuwan Atom — Destiny 1, Heart's Desire 7, Personality 3.

Frederik Schodt — Destiny 1, Heart's Desire 7, Personality 3.

Identical. All three. The translator and the work. The sixth clean match this series has produced.

And then it gets worse, and I want to walk through it slowly, because this is the most seductive thing this method has ever handed me and I need you to watch me not take it.

Part 1 established the founding demonstration of this entire project: Tetsuwan Atom is a Destiny 1 and Astro Boy is a Destiny 7. Same robot, two names, two numbers — the proof that the arithmetic reads spelling. That is the fact this series is built on.

Now look at Schodt again.

His Destiny is 1 — the number of the Japanese title.

His Heart's Desire is 7 — the number of the English title.

His Personality is 3 — which is the number Part 1 found on both titles, the one thing that survived the Pacific unchanged, the entertainer, the delight that crossed whole when the bomb in the name did not.

The man who carried Tetsuwan Atom into English contains, on his three axes: the Japanese destiny, the English destiny, and the thing that survived. He is the crossing. Both banks and the bridge, in one name.

I sat with that for a while.

It is a coincidence. Here is the deflation, and it is total. He matches Tetsuwan Atom exactly — that is one match, one event, at the rate this series has already established as ordinary. Given that single match, the 1 and the 3 are not additional miracles; they are the same miracle, counted three times. And the 7 is not an extra coincidence either: Tetsuwan Atom's Heart's Desire was already 7, sitting there in Part 1, and Astro Boy's Destiny is also 7, which is its own separate accident that I am now retroactively welding to this one. I have taken one coincidence and one leftover and narrated them into a bridge.

That is exactly how this always works. That is the machine. Part 3 said it: run enough pairs and eventually one lines up, and if you are not careful you write a very stupid essay about destiny. This one lined up on a man I admire, in an essay about the people this series has been ignoring, and I felt the pull — I felt myself wanting it to mean that the right man had been sent — and that pull is the whole disease. It is not evidence. It is a story I am very motivated to tell, wearing arithmetic as a costume.

So: nothing. A sum. Six letters and eleven letters.

And I am keeping it in the essay, because the point of nine hundred of these has never been that the numbers are meaningless. It has been that they are meaningless and I look anyway, and that looking is most of what criticism ever is. The number sent me to read about a man who spent fifty years making the argument that this medium was worth taking seriously, and I would not have written this essay otherwise, and he deserved it more than the lawyer did.

Tezuka's Number, and the Honest Ending

Osamu Tezuka comes out a Destiny 9 — the Humanitarian and Sage, endings, compassion, and the closing of cycles — with a Heart's Desire of 1: the will to act alone.

Spelling. But it sends me back to Part 1, and to a boy named after the bomb by a man who had watched the war from a factory floor in Osaka, and to the American who spent his life explaining to English speakers what that had actually been.

Because here is what Schodt's career actually demonstrates, and it is not mystical.

The losses in this series were never really failures of skill. Nobody botched the atom in Atom's name because their Japanese was weak; Fred Ladd's Japanese had nothing to do with it. The bomb came out of the name because nobody in the room knew it was in there, and nobody in the room knew because nobody had told them, and nobody had told them because in 1963 there was no book, no field, no vocabulary, and no Frederik Schodt.

What a translator carries is not words. Words are the easy part, and Part 24 will argue that a machine now does them well. What a translator carries is the knowledge that something is there — that Uzumaki means spiral and it matters, that shiin is the sound of silence, that the rabbit is in Usagi's name and it is the whole premise, that chihayafuru is a pillow word and cannot be rendered, that oni is not a demon. None of that is in the text. All of it has to be in a person, put there over decades, at their own expense.

Which is why Schodt's real work was the book and not the translations. He was not trying to render Tezuka into English. He was trying to make an English-speaking world that could tell what had been lost.

The Close

The credit page is at the front, in six-point type, and it says: Translation. Adaptation. Lettering. Touch-up. Three or four names you have never once read.

Those people made every decision in this series. They decided whether you got the honorific and whether the joke landed and whether the earthquake in chapter 201 happened at all. When they were perfect you did not notice, and when they were wrong the internet made a meme of it, and either way nobody learned their name.

Which is a funny outcome for a series that has spent twenty-one parts arguing that a name is the first thing to go and the last thing to matter. Yubaba took Chihiro's name and put her to work. This industry takes nobody's name — it just never prints it large enough to read, and the work gets done anyway, and the book arrives in your hands as though it had always been in English.

Frederik Schodt has the same three numbers as Tetsuwan Atom. It means nothing at all. He carried the boy across the Pacific and then spent forty years explaining what the boy's name had been, and there is no arithmetic on earth that could have told you that was the important part.