Character · Akira
Tetsuo Shima
The frightening thing in Akira is not the psychic explosion. It is the boy who spent his whole life being rescued.
In Otakana the clue reads: Biker whose psychic power runs out of control
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Akira
- Letters
- 6 · Normal
Tetsuo Shima rides at the back of Kaneda's gang and hates it. He is smaller, weaker and permanently in debt to a friend who keeps saving him without noticing that he does. When his bike hits something on the highway outside Neo-Tokyo and the military collects the wreck, the tests they run wake a power he had no idea he was carrying. The resentment finally has a delivery system.
What follows is not a training arc. Tetsuo's ability grows faster than his capacity to hold it, and the horror comes from watching a teenager learn that being the strongest person alive does not make the headaches stop. He tears through the city looking for anyone who can tell him what he is turning into. Nobody can. The pills stop working.
Katsuhiro Otomo drew the manga from 1982 to 1990, more than two thousand pages, and cut the 1988 film out of the middle of it while the ending was still unwritten. The two versions part company and both are worth your time. Akira is set in 2019, in a city rebuilt on the crater of an explosion and preparing to host the Olympic Games, a detail that aged strangely well.
Spelling TETSUO
TETSUO is the given name; Shima is the family name and the game does not ask for it. The middle is one Japanese kana, the small burst written TSU in Hepburn, so the word runs te-tsu-o in three beats but six letters. People who type it from sound drop the S and write TETUO. The tail is a bare vowel pair, U then O.