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These first 3 stories are all amazing so far. Now it may also be that my husband playing a creepy video game with creepy music is enhancing the experience... I’m not very smart some days (lol!) The Sad Tale of the Principal Post: A man is trapped under the principal post holding up a family’s new home. The entire house could collapse if it is moved. But, how did he end up trapped beneath it in the first place?
A fantastic collection of translated 'illustrated' short stories. What do you call a graphic novel when it's not novel size? I honestly don't know. i☆Ris the Movie - Full Energy!! - Anime Film Teaser Visual Revealed at i☆Ris Live Stage in Anime NYC & i☆Ris First Performance in New York Successfully Completed Master Umezz and Me- 2 stars I didn’t care for the art in this one and I wasn’t a fan of the story. It was a biographical reflection on Juji Ito’s love for the writer Umezz and I appreciated the story, but the art was not good.The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. For example: A girl's hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head; Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other; a woman treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister's skin, etc. The Human Chair', based on a famous story by Edogawa Ranpo, opens with a young writer (who rather resembles Tomie, and is not the last female character in the book to do so) hearing the story of Yoshiko Togawa, a well-known author in the early 20th century. Yoshiko receives a peculiar manuscript in which a man claims to have concealed himself inside a chair and fallen in love with the woman who uses it. She then grows increasingly paranoid about the chair in her study. It's a great combination of creepiness and melodrama. Billions Alone creeped the hell out of me. A story about seriously screwed up murders being committed if you gather in groups. Seriously relevant with the world in which we are currently living in. victims are chosen who do not partake in a lifestyle that can only be described in self isolating. Raw and poignant. Something I’m starting to realize as a recurring theme in Ito’s work is obsessive men pining—and becoming violent—over beautiful women. This one was definitely cool but not really my cuppa tea; I’m not so hot on alien conspiracies. The Human Chair (Edogawa Ranpo): Junji Ito’s adaptation of this 1925 horror story works well with his terrifying artwork. What happens if buying a new chair turns into a nightmare? That’s what happens when a young author enters into a furniture store and is told the tale of Togawa Yoshiko’s armchair which contained a deadly secret… This has made me want to read the original story aswell now! So creepy!
Master Umezz and Me” is an homage to Manga-ka Kazuo Umezz, of the Drifting Classroom fame, an inspiration for Ito. So here’s the thing with Ito: like HP Lovecraft, Ito is great at producing haunting images of primal horror but, also like Lovecraft, he’s very clumsy, almost amateurish, in incorporating these images into traditional stories. What you’re left with is some genuinely disturbing visions of horror scattered amidst numerous quite dull, predictable and almost laughably goofy stories.
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This collection reminded me quite viscerally of when I was a kid and I’d spend my evenings reading horror folklore anthologies at my local library (featuring stories like “The Green Ribbon,” about a girl also named Jenny whose fate freaked me out for years). I like it when these collections feature the same characters in different stories - Ito does this often - but I wanted more with the female author and felt like her story just ... ended. The other stories are mostly ok but either not long enough or not particularly memorable. The titular story for me was one of the weakest ones, but The Sad Tale of the Principal Post was especially dumb and pointless. This one starts off with a bang: a baby has been discovered within the grave of young master Toyoji’s first wife—a woman who has been dead for nine months. In the time since her death, Toyoji has taken his mistress as his wife and welcomed their first child. Billions Alone” is about this serial killer (girl) who sends messages out about how important it is for people to "get together" and not self isolate too much, then kills people and sews them together. Successfully creepy.
Of course the conclusion is more terrarian than otherworldly and the story suggests Mariko's Venusian looks, whether visible or not, drive men to madness. Her experience has more than a casual similarity to idol culture and its most fervent fans. The club members grow violent in their self-proclaimed right to possess Mariko while her father's actions remove her agency from the story further. She is never given the opportunity to decide for herself what she wants romantically and meets a sorrowful end due to the club's own misogyny. Venus in the Blind Spot, also titled Disappearing Venus or Vanishing Venus, is the fourth story featured in the collection Venus in the Blind Spot. year-old Michio has been a recluse for the last 7 years when he’s approached by his former classmates to attend a class reunion and coming-of-age ceremony. Except that bodies keep turning up in his town—“group corpses” who’ve been grotesquely stitched together using fishing line. Keepsake: This was by far the most disturbing tale. A corpse of a woman is found to have given birth to a fully alive baby. How could this be so!? The final notable chapter is none other than "The Amigara Fault," a story that has perhaps been meme-ed to death at this point but still stands as a strong story about compulsion with an undercurrent of trypophobia. When an earthquake shifts the landscape, it reveals a series of human-shaped holes carved in the mountainside with no logical source. People from all around begin heading to the faultline after seeing its footage on television, each convinced they have found the hole made just for them. One after another, individuals begin filling their respective voids – seemingly compelled the moment they became aware of its existence.
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I feel like this was missing a critical piece but of something. Yet I can’t quite figure out what that might be... Nov 24 Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space Releases an Update Featuring a New Episode 'The Cliffs of Wyrmrest (Wryz Saga I)' on November 24 The Enigma of Amigara Fault” is maybe the best, a fan fave? About an earthquake that causes a fault, where we see the outlines of cutouts of human figures, and people are drawn to see it, and then are drawn to fit in these holes. Just weird. Over the weekend I finally got to reading Junji Ito’s manga, devouring all three volumes of Uzumaki in as many days. So while I haven’t exactly read enough of this horror master’s work to know what constitutes the “best” of his canon, I will say that the stories collected in Venus in the Blind Spot were mostly enjoyable—and rife with Ito’s trademark body horror ingenuity.
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