Osamu Tezuka — "Please, Just Let Me Work"

Osamu Tezuka, the god of manga, held a medical license and a doctorate. Torn between the stable path of medicine and the then-lowly path of comics, he asked his mother, who reportedly answered: "Which do you love?" He chose manga.

What followed was output on a historic scale: some 700 titles and 150,000 pages, effectively inventing story manga — Astro Boy, Phoenix, Black Jack — laying the foundations of anime and manga nearly alone. What seizes me is his end: on his deathbed, drifting from consciousness, he reportedly repeated, "I beg you, let me work."

He was sixty; his life-work Phoenix remains unfinished. To die pleading to work may look like madness; to me it looks like supreme happiness — a life in which, to the final moment, what he longed to do stood before him. Only those who make their love their work remain active until the last day.

What do you work for?