- The night has a myriad of different faces, and there is a man who peers into them one by one...his name is Midnight.
Midnight (ミッドナイト) is a manga by Osamu Tezuka that was originally serialized in Weekly Shonen Champion from May 2, 1986 to September 18, 1987.
It follows the eponymous cab driver who operates only at night time and encounters many passengers alongside the different issues they have. He has a unique cab that has a fifth wheel installed, among many other tricks to solve whatever problem he’s faced with.
It received a live-action short film adaptation in 2024 directed by Takashi Miike that was shot on iPhone 15 Pro and can be viewed here
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Tropes in Midnight
- Badass Driver: Midnight is an effective cab driver who can easily take on risky shortcuts and can hold his own in direct combat if necessary.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Happens every so often with characters commenting on events happening as if they were in a manga. One such moment happens when Midnight meets Black Jack for the first time and the latter tells him about how he and Midnight are both created by Tezuka.
- Cool Car: Midnight’s taxi has a fifth wheel that he can use to bypass obstacles and is armed with other gizmos to fend off baddies and get his passengers to their destination quicker.
- Driven to Suicide: One chapter has Midnight meet an old lady who is trying to kill herself after believing that her son died overseas upon being given his bloodied jacket. Midnight discourages her from these suicide attempts through telling her about his comatose girlfriend.
- Flashback Nightmare: Midnight falls asleep in his car during one chapter and dreams about visiting his foster father’s grave while reminiscing about how badly things went between the two.
- Following in Relative's Footsteps: One recurring character is a young woman who became a truck driver like her father and took over the business after his death.
- Japanese Delinquents: Midnight was originally part of a gang of hooligans until he got into a car accident that rendered his girlfriend brain-dead. He has since left that life behind to get the money needed to pay for her medical operation.
- Karmic Jackpot: Hinata, an intern for a company, takes Midnight’s cab so that he can deliver a file to his boss before an airplane carrying him takes off. A woman whose son is ill ends up complicating things and Hinata decides to help them find a doctor. After barely making it in time to deliver the file, Hinata gets fired for being on the runway as the plane was taking off, but Midnight finds him and brings alongside the woman and the now-cured child. The woman reveals that she’s the CEO of a computer firm and offers Hinata a job there as a reward for helping her and the child.
- Meaningful Name: Midnight is a fitting name for someone who only operates during night time.
- The Night Owl: As mentioned, Midnight is mainly active during night time, whether it’s driving people to their destinations or simply visiting places in his spare time.
- Recycled Premise: A gruff, but good-hearted young man helps people with their problems, charges them a lot of money for his services, and doesn’t have an official license for said services. It’s basically Tezuka's Black Jack with cab driving instead of surgery.
- Rejecting the Inheritance: Midnight is visited by a mysterious woman who is revealed to be his twin sister and is told that he has inherited some land from his real father who had just been deceased. Midnight refuses the offer and gets into a fight with his sister who wanted the land for herself.
- Searching for the Lost Relative: One chapter is focused on Roburou, one of Midnight’s passengers who is looking for his father Kintarou, a private that fell in love with a girl from Catanduanes. With the search going nowhere and to make Roburou happy, Midnight asks the ramen shop owner to pretend to be Roburou’s father. The end of the chapter reveals that the ramen shop owner really was Roburou’s father, but Midnight is unable to tell Roburou that before the latter’s plane takes off.
- Sham Supernatural: A woman wants to live with Midnight after seeing that a man she was previously in love with was a con artist and learning that her father was arrested for fraud shortly afterwards. Midnight pretends to be a vampire living in an abandoned house to scare her away from him.
- The Taxi: The main character drives a taxi during night hours and finds himself getting involved with the various problems his passengers are dealing with.
- The Trees Have Faces: The penultimate chapter has Midnight coming across a tree belonging to a man whose wife and child was run over by a car. The tree is noted to have a scary face that startles drivers and gets them killed while trying to swerve around it.
- Unsuccessful Pet Adoption: One storyline has the owner of a ramen shop that Midnight visits adopting a lynx after it was hit by a car and Midnight tended its wounds. The lynx grows up, becomes more aggressive, and ends up attacking the man who ran it over before running away and dying following an unsuccessful search by Midnight.
