I was fortunate. Fortunate in that I had a learned individual informed me of the background in which ‘Ayako’ was created which allowed me to understand the reasoning behind many of the plot points and the overall theme.

Because the story would have looked awful without the understanding of that background.

The reason being that much of it isn’t presented well, and it ends up looking silly and vapid without the proper presentation. Eventually, the story does get around to leading readers in the right direction of understanding, but that is well over 50% into the story and it is still fairly easy to lose sight of.

Thing is that the themes within Ayako are actually pretty universal and timeless. Intra-family power struggles, changing times upheaving old knowledge/structures/understanding, complex individual personalities acting immoral in some cases and moral in others, and all forced within the rigid framework known as ‘society’.

However, the above themes get lost due to the seemingly simple and rather blunt story. The simple and crass characters. The simple and unsubtle plot. And so on. It's unfortunate, but the manga is really outdated, though it was likely good for its time. Today, though, even low-ranking modern manga tend to create superior stories with more well defined/created characters.

But, again, I was informed that much of the story was written as a sort of overview of post-WWII Japan and the feelings Tezuka has about the American occupancy and the dirty laundry of Japanese aristocracy. Due to that background knowledge, I had read the story while viewing all the characters within the story as symbolism rather than actual characters. Each character we are presented are representative of an aspect of Japanese society. They’re inter-connected and the actions of one ultimately affect the other in a sort of circle of tragedy, uplifting, and just plain ol’ life.

Through this view, it seems to me that the story made much more sense and the complexity which seemed non-existent seemingly came into play and became visible. The events that happened which seemed to have made little to no sense suddenly became understandable. As a result, Ayako became vastly more enjoyable.

Should everyone read the manga as I did? No, absolutely not. I believe manga (or any medium, really) is better experienced and perceived by individual's own taste. However, I think many people would enjoy Ayako much more so long as they do not accept everything at face value as I might have done had I not known.