Akira Review: The Manga That Invented Modern Science Fiction

Quick Take

• 6 volumes that redefined what comics could look like and what they could say
• Published from 1982–1990, it predicted so much of what came after: cyberpunk aesthetics, post-apocalyptic cities, the anxieties of unchecked power
• Essential reading for anyone serious about manga as an art form

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Who Is This Manga For?

Akira is for you if:

• You want to understand the history of manga — this is one of the most important works ever published
• You love epic science fiction with real philosophical weight
• You appreciate art direction as much as storytelling — Otomo's visual world is extraordinary
• You want something that feels genuinely different from everything you've read

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Content Warnings & Age Rating

Age Rating: M (Mature) Content Warnings: Extreme violence and gore, war and urban destruction depicted extensively, body horror (transformation sequences), psychological horror, drug use as a plot element

Akira is adult content. The violence is graphic and the themes are serious. This is not a casual read — it demands attention and emotional readiness.

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Yu's Rating

Category	Score
Story Depth	★★★★★
Art Style	★★★★★
Character Development	★★★★☆
Accessibility for Non-Japanese Readers	★★★☆☆
Reread Value	★★★★★

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Story Overview

1988. A mysterious explosion levels Tokyo, triggering World War III. Thirty-one years later, Neo-Tokyo rises from the ruins on reclaimed land — a gleaming, corrupt metropolis preparing to host the Olympics, plagued by gangs, political violence, and a government that fears what it doesn't control.

Kaneda is a biker, a delinquent, a teenager with no plan beyond the next race. His best friend Tetsuo is weaker, angrier, always in Kaneda's shadow. One night, their gang encounters a strange child on a highway — a child with an old face, with a number instead of a name, with power no human should have.

When Tetsuo touches the child, something awakens in him. Psychic power — vast, unstable, consuming. The military contains him. Studies him. Runs tests. What they discover is that what Tetsuo has is connected to something the government has been hiding for decades: a secret so dangerous it destroyed the old Tokyo.

His name was Akira.

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Characters

Kaneda Shotaro — The protagonist, and one of manga's most unusual heroes. He's not trying to save the world. He's trying to save his friend. His red motorcycle is as iconic as he is.

Tetsuo Shima — The tragedy at the center of the story. A boy who has always felt small, weak, and overlooked, suddenly given power that overwhelms everything — including himself. His transformation is one of the most harrowing character arcs in science fiction.

Kei — A resistance fighter who gets drawn into the central conflict. She carries the story's moral center in a narrative that sometimes seems to have none.

The Espers — The numbered children with psychic powers who appear young but are ancient. Their existence, and what was done to them, is the key to everything.

The Colonel — The military figure who has contained the secret for decades. He is neither villain nor hero — he is a person who made difficult choices for defensible reasons and must live with what those choices became.

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Art Style

There is nothing in manga that looks like Akira.

Otomo's backgrounds are extraordinarily detailed — Neo-Tokyo is rendered as a complete, lived-in city, with texture and density that makes it feel real. His crowd scenes contain hundreds of individual people. His machinery is architecturally precise.

The action sequences are unlike anything else from this era — dynamic, spatially coherent, physically believable even when depicting impossible things. The psychic power visualization, in particular, required Otomo to invent new visual languages for things no one had depicted before.

Akira was published in black and white but was colored by Otomo for the American release — the colored version has its own stunning visual identity. Both versions are worth experiencing.

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Cultural Context

The 2020 Tokyo Olympics — Akira is set in 2019 Neo-Tokyo, hosting Olympics in 2020. When the manga was published in 1982, this was pure speculation. When Japan actually hosted the Olympics in 2021 (delayed one year by COVID-19), the parallel was noted worldwide. Otomo's prescience about the shape of the future is part of what makes Akira legendary.

Post-war Japanese anxiety — The destruction and rebuilding of Tokyo at the center of Akira's story is impossible to read without thinking of the actual destruction and rebuilding of Japanese cities after World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question of what was lost and what was built on top of that loss haunts the narrative.

Youth and rage — Kaneda and Tetsuo's generation — young people in a prosperous but hollow city, with no investment in the society they've inherited — reflects real anxieties about youth rebellion in 1980s Japan. The biker gangs of Akira were drawn from real bōsōzoku subculture.

Unchecked scientific power — The government's secret experiments on the Espers, and the catastrophic result of suppressing rather than understanding extraordinary power, reflects Japanese cultural memory of the nuclear age and the specific horror of power that exceeds human control.

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What I Love About It

There is a moment in the final volume where the scale of what Otomo has been building simply becomes visible. Not a twist — a revelation of scope. The story that seemed to be about Kaneda and Tetsuo turns out to be about something vast and old and sad.

I remember putting down the volume and looking at the cover for a while.

What stays with me is not the spectacle — and the spectacle is extraordinary. What stays with me is the relationship between Kaneda and Tetsuo. Two boys who grew up together, one always stronger, one always reaching. What happens when the one who was weaker becomes, briefly, all-powerful, and what the one who was always stronger does with that.

It's a simple human story inside an enormous science fiction epic. That combination — the human inside the cosmic — is what makes great science fiction, and Akira does it better than almost anything else I've read.

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What English-Speaking Fans Say

Akira holds a unique place in Western manga fandom — it was one of the first manga widely distributed in the West, and many older readers encountered it before manga was a mainstream category. For younger readers discovering it now, it often arrives as a revelation: evidence that manga was doing things 40 years ago that still feel ahead of their time.

Common praise: the art, the scope, the ambition. Common criticism: the political subplot in the middle volumes can feel dense and slow compared to the more kinetic early sections.

The consensus: essential. Not just for manga fans — for anyone interested in the history of visual storytelling.

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Memorable Scene ⚠️ Spoiler Warning

Tetsuo's final transformation.

In the climax, Tetsuo's uncontrolled power causes his body to expand and mutate beyond recognition — consuming everything around him, growing without limit, becoming something that is no longer human in any recognizable sense.

Kaneda tries to reach him. He calls his name.

Inside the horror, something hears him.

What Otomo does visually in this sequence — depicting something beyond human comprehension while maintaining a thread of human connection — is extraordinary. It shouldn't work. It does.

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Similar Manga

If you liked Akira, try:

• Ghost in the Shell — Also cyberpunk, more philosophical, equally foundational
• Dorohedoro — Same energy, similarly world-building dense dark fantasy
• Berserk — Different genre, similar scope and ambition
• Biomega — More recent, similar post-apocalyptic scope, visually influenced by Akira

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Reading Order / Where to Start

Start from Volume 1. Akira is a continuous narrative and the volumes are very long — each one contains far more pages than a standard manga volume.

Note: The original Japanese release was 120+ individual chapters collected into 6 volumes. The American release has been published both as individual volumes and as the original serialization. The standard 6-volume format is the most accessible.

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Official English Translation Status

Status: Complete English Volumes: 6 (all volumes available) Translator: Kodansha Comics USA Translation Quality: Excellent — Dark Horse's original translation remains highly regarded

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Pros & Cons

Pros

• One of the most visually ambitious manga ever published — the art alone justifies reading it
• A genuinely important work in the history of visual storytelling
• The human story inside the science fiction epic is quietly devastating
• 6 large volumes — substantial but completable

Cons

• Very dense and demanding — not a casual read
• The political subplot in the middle sections can be confusing
• The Mature content is significant — not for all readers
• The scale and ambition can make the character work feel secondary at times

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Format Comparison

Format	Volumes	Price per vol. (approx.)	Best for
Paperback (individual)	6 vols	~$25–30	Standard edition
Complete Box Set	1 box	~$130–150	Collector's edition

Note: Akira is not currently available as a Kindle edition. Physical copies are the only option. The volumes are significantly larger and more expensive than standard manga due to their size and page count.

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Where to Buy

• 📚 Akira Vol. 1 — Paperback

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