Manga4Kids: Manga Reviews for Parents and Kids

Plot Summary:

Warning: Plot spoilers! There are eight separate episodes.

1. The good-for-nothing son of a rich man crashes his car and lies near death. To save him, Black Jack needs all the organs from a fresh corpse. The rich man has an innocent bystander arrested and sentenced to death, then delivers the prisoner to Black Jack for execution and organ harvesting. A few hours later, Black Jack pronounces the surgery a success. What he has actually done, though, is let the rich son die and performed plastic surgery on the innocent boy, making him look like the rich man's son.

2. A patient's face has been taken over by an ugly face with a mind of its own. Black Jack cures the patient, only to find that he was a serial killer who felt no urge to kill when he had the face affliction; by curing him of that, Black Jack has turned him back into a killer. The killer tries to murder Black Jack, but the ugly face returns. Disoriented, the murderer runs off a cliff. "Let the guy die," the face tells Black Jack. "I was hopin' I could save him." As he dies, the ugly face fades back to the man's original face. "Perhaps that was the face of his conscience," Black Jack muses as he walks away.

3. A woman has an undeveloped twin growing inside her body like a tumor. Whenever doctors try to remove it, they become disoriented. Black Jack tells the twin that he will not kill it but preserve it, so it allows him to operate. Later, he assembles the pile of organs into a little girl. When the woman comes back for a checkup, he introduces her twin sister, but she rejects the little girl. In the last scene, the woman drives away while the girl leans against Black Jack and sobs. In the stories that follow, the girl, Pinoco, stays on as Black Jack's assistant.

4. A flashback to medical school. Black Jack falls in love with a fellow student, then must save her from death by ovarian cancer by removing all her female organs. She starts life anew as a man, and enjoys her "man's job" as a ship's doctor.

5. A sushi chef is hit by a garbage truck and loses both his arms. He asks to teach the truck driver to make sushi, so that he can fulfill a promise to make sushi for his aged mother. The driver struggles at first, but eventually learns to make sushi as good as the chef. They visit the chef's mother and serve her the sushi, which she pronounces the best in Japan. The truck driver decides to become a full-time sushi chef, but then he is hit by a truck and killed. Black Jack transplants his hands onto the original sushi chef, and takes his fee in sushi.

6. Black Jack receives a scalpel in the mail and realizes it is from Dr. Jotaro Honm. Black Jack was in a terrible accident when he was a child. Honma saved his life but left a scalpel inside his patient during the operation. For seven years he was tormented by the knowledge of what he had done; finally he asked Black Jack to come in for a second operation and removed the scalpel, without ever telling him about it. Now nearing death, Honma confesses all this to Black Jack and tells him an amazing fact: Black Jack's body had secreted calcium over the scalpel, like an oyster forming a pearl, so it never harmed him. As he finishes, the doctor suffers a stroke. Black Jack rushes him to a hospital and tries to save him, but fails. Dr. Honma dies, and as Black Jack weeps, his ghost stands behind him, saying, "It is vanity for us to think we have control over life and death."

7. A young boy stands on a bridge, about to commit suicide because he has failed his entrance exams for college. A road worker intercepts him, feeds him breakfast, and talks some sense into him. The worker is seriously injured in an accident, losing both legs and an arm. The boy watches as Black Jack stitches him back together, struggling to keep the patient alive as his heart begins to fail. Afterward, the boy tells Black Jack "now I know what a real matter of life and death is."

8. Black Jack has removed a tumor from a wealthy developer, saving his life, but the patient refuses to pay. However, he does include Black Jack on a tour of his new, earthquake-proof building. Naturally, he locks himself, his colleagues, and Black Jack into a solid, soundproof chamber with no means of exit. The only way out is to cut a cable inside the wall, and the only tools they have are Black Jack's scalpels. Black Jack taps the wall to locate the cable, as the developers complain, jeer at him, and claim they would pay huge sums to get out of there. When Black Jack successfully cuts the cable and frees them, they immediately disappear, claiming their offers were merely exaggerations.