Over the past year, I have read most of the available Junji Ito in translation, and boy, is it a blast. Ito is the master of visual manga horror, and his methods of storytelling are uncanny, waking nightmares that push characters to a terrifying, existential moment of clarity… and this even bleeds through to his autobiographical, shorter piece, simply about owning cats.
I plan on absolutely continuing to read Ito, but there are plenty of commonalities with the books that I read – No Longer Human, Gyo, Tomie, Yon & Mu, and others… All of these texts focus on two things, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.
One is the absolute horror of living on the planet Earth in these unpredictable and highly susceptible flesh robots that can completely betray us at any moment. Whether it be through the extreme needs that drive our conscious and unconscious decisions to the brink of self-destruction, to nature (or aliens) co-opting our bodies and exploding or invading us from the inside out, no one does extreme body horror better. While dying of cancer alone in a nursing home is horrific enough, but what about being compelled to not die, and not die, and not die, and get sucked in to death by the perpetually tortured heartbreaker? Or dive deep, further and further into a void for work, not knowing if you are contributing to something bigger or just bringing your mind, your team, humanity down with you?
The second is the mundanity of it all. How silly, how terrible, how abrupt and violent things end. But first, a meal. A conversation. School. Then, the “what if?” when everything changes for a day. Forever.
I really love these. Everything I love about horror, the screaming pain of existing in the face of the stuff we need to do every day. It is less David Cronenberg and much more David Lynch… But an entirely new kind of horror that echoes the eastern film traditions of Kurosawa, Jan-wook, Joon Hoo, Gong… Brilliant new stories that are mundane and then horrifically chilling. Wonders to behold, and a mirror to stare deep into and fear everything that may come next.
Garrett Zecker 