MANGA MANIA: Museum of Terrors Volume 1: Tomie

On a beautiful spring day in Japan, Mr. Tanagi  takes his high school class on a mountainside hike. Tomie, the teenage hottie he's having an affair with, threatens to tell his wife about their relationship if he doesn't marry her. Fortunately, just minutes later she angers a male classmate who is also in love with her and he pushes her off a cliff. She dies. 

What to do? Mr. Tanagi tells the female students to go on ahead, turns to his males students, and tells them to take off their clothes. Here the story does not take the direction one would expect. He wants the boys stripped to their underwear so they can cut Tomie into little pieces without getting blood on their school uniforms. Problem solved. Only the next day, Tomie shows up for class, a little late but in one piece. And evil.

Junji Ito's other horror tales have cosmic themes. A small fishing village falls under the spell of spirals. The entire world is overrun with dead fish walking out of the ocean on tiny mechanical legs. Tomie seems like a regression to more mundane, traditional horror -- I noticed one reader review calls it a Japanese version of Heathers. But Ito spins the theme of the beautiful girl who won't stay dead into a series of related tales that are creepy as all get out and wildly entertaining. 

Tomie shows her practical side

Men cannot resist Tomie, yet they are driven to kill her. Stabbing her will seldom do. More often they behead her or chop her up. Beheading her makes a certain amount of sense when she is growing a second hideous face alongside her beautiful everyday visage. But the blood that gushes into the carpet takes on a life of its own and she's back. Tossing the carpet into the rubbish heap only causes an entire crop to Tomies to sprout like so many murderous daisies. Toss her bits into a deep pool below a waterfall and her spirit lures suicidal young men to the cliffs so she can feed on their bodies. It goes on and one.

There is another volume of these stores and a batch of Japanese film versions. Judging from the packaging, some of the films slip into the softcore pinkie film category. Ito's stories, so far, are a clever blend of black comedy and grotesque horror. Men just can't resist the girl. Although they know she has regenerated herself from a severed head kept in an aquarium, two doctors have this exchange.

"What an ungodly monster!"
"You're telling me. And yet...an extremely alluring one."

In the next panel the doctor is showing Tomie into his condo. Big mistake.

Tomie shows her true nature

MANGA MANIA: GYO VOL 2 by Junjji Ito

At the end of volume 1, the hordes of dead fish marching onto land with their tiny mechanical legs had spread from Okinawa to the coast of Japan. Tadashi's girlfriend Kaori had become infected by the gaseous excretions from the mobile dead fish, his uncle Koyanagi was doing what he could to help, and Tadishi himself passed out in a vat of what appeared to be minnows mixed with the occasional squid. Just the typical goings on for an Ito manga. 

Tadashi comes to in a hospital and discovers that Japan along with the rest of the world is now overrun by the fish. A nurse tells him most people are becoming accustomed to the smell, but I find that hard to believe. Tadashi makes it across a Tokyo now under marshall law to his uncle's house. Uncle Kovanagi turns out not be so trustworthy after all, but what do you expect from a character drawn to look like Charles Manson. For the next hundred pages, Ito keeps upping the ante on weirdness and repulsiveness, OK, maybe none of it makes much sense, and scenes become somewhat repetitive and arbitrary, but Ito paints a convincingly nightmarish picture of what happens when fish with mechanical legs take over the land. He even creates a circus where infected humans are forced to perform for an audience of one.

Gyo has been made into an animated film. I missed the screening when it played a festival here in Dallas. Reports from those who both stayed up past midnight to watch it and made it all the way through were most enthusiastic.

  

MANGA MANIA: GYO by Junji Ito

And we're off!

Junji Ito's last outing involved a remote seaside village overcome by a geometric shape. That idea may not leave you shaking in your boots, but by the time Uzumaki reached its transcendent conclusion, Ito had literally put you through the wringer. The story gave new meaning to the idea of getting tangled up with your neighbors, and you shared with the protagonists the finer points of how to balance prohibitions against cannibalism with the fact that your little brother had turned into a very tasty looking snail and you were starving.

Gyo, titled in English The Death Stench Creeps opens on Okinawa. Tadishi and his really pretty awful girl friend Kaori are spending an unfun vacation on the island. There is a smell of rotten fish floating about, but no one expects the cause to be fish with legs crawling onto the shore and into the city. As for the smell? The fish are dead, it is only their tiny mechanical legs that keep them ambulatory. And actually "tiny" is not consistently correct. Great white sharks have great big legs.

Takshi and Kaori make it back to Tokyo but soon the fish are appearing on the Western beaches of the main island. And Kaori will not shut up about the smell. And she seems to blame Takishi for everything that is happening. Note to Takishi: Get a better girlfriend. 

But poor Kaori. She suffers the fate worth than death when wounds from the mechanical fishy legs prove infectious in a most disgusting way. 

Things go from bad to worse, and one thing I like about Ito's manga, at least the one's I've read, is that he wraps everything up in two or three books. This first volume ends with every possible worst case scenario coming to pass, and I can hardly wait to see how much worse things get before they get very much weirder in Volume 2.

It is not going away

MANGA MANIA: UZUMAKI VOL 3, by Junji Ito

Uzumaki, Volume 3 by Junji Ito
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Things have gone from bad to worse in the fog-bound  Kurozu-cho, the Japanese city cursed by the Spiral -- yes that seemingly inoffensive pattern that is literally twisting the lives of these unfortunate citizens all out of shape. A sense that something is wrong in Kurozu-cho has reached the outside world, but aid workers are either caught up in whirlwinds or sunk in maelstroms. Those that make it through find themselves trapped as well.

This is Vol. 3 of Ito's manga. I read the first volume and couldn't find a copy of the second, but I can't imagine that whatever weirdness takes place in between can come close to the apocalyptic visions of the finale. All modern construction in Kurozu-cho has been destroyed by whirlwinds that arise from the slightest movements or sounds the inhabitants make. Thuggish kids older lowlifes have learned to ride the whirlwinds and direct them toward their old schools and the civic buildings. Watching all this, even the nice boy who is one our heros can't help but comment, "Hmm, looks like fun." The only buildings not affected by the whirlwinds are the oldest, wooden row houses scattered through the city. But as citizens cram into them for safety, you learn a new and disgusting connotation for the idea of social entanglements.

Question: Is it cannibalism if your neighbors have turned into giant snails? Or does it come down to just the issue of roasted or raw?

The cosmic finale is more about resignation than transcendence, although the latter does play a role. It would take Hollywood to give this one a happy ending.



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MANGA MANIA: UZUMAKI by Junji Ito

Uzumaki, Volume 1 by Junji Ito
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I became aware of Uzumaki several years ago when the film version (2000, dir. Higuchinsky) made its way onto my Netflix queue. HIguchinsky is a Ukrainian born Japanese director of music videos who has not made a feature since 2003.Uzumaki tells the story of a remote mountainside Japanese village, accessible only by a long tunnel cut through the mountain, where the inhabitants fall under the spell of Spirals. That probably doesn't have you shaking in your boots, but the sheer weirdness of the concept, and the way in which it unfolds, does have its unsettling moments. I guess this is a spoiler, but when the teenage characters finally decide to flee the village, which I would have done about the time one of my classmates showed up secreting snail slime and  climbing up the wall, when these kids get in the car to make their escape, the last line of the film is, "There is no light at the end of the tunnel."

Like so many of these films, Uzumaki started its career as a manga series, eventually collected into three volumes. Although the situations are as bizarre as those of the film it inspired, it can never be as unsettling as its cinematic counterpart. In the graphic format, the visceral extravagance of Hideshi Hino is much more effective than Ito's atmospherics. The young protagonists watch their parents and classmates go mad in the most bizarre ways, but they stay on, going to their school and sharing meals with their deranged families. Of course, if they were to leave, there would be no story, and as I learned from the film, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

The local library had only the Uzumaki Vol. 1, so if I want to proceed it is either interlibrary loan or Amazon secondhand.


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