MANGA MANIA: THE CAT EYED BOY by Kazuo Umezu

After the ten volumes of zany, vicious, fevered violence in Umezu's The Drifting Classroom, I found this collection of stories a bit tame. The Cat Eyed Boy joins the ranks of Japanese manga characters who hide out in people's homes. Hideshi Hino has Oninbo, the tiny fellow who builds his cocoon in people's attics while he waits for the bug from hell infecting one of the family member's to mature to a size worth devouring. He's a good guy. In Umezu's Orochi: Blood there is the little girl who lives behind the curtains and in the empty rooms of a mansion whose residents she watches over. Her only problem is that if she falls asleep, it could be for fifteen minutes or fifteen years.

The Cat Eyed Boy, rejected by society because of his scary appearance, wanders the city, looking for a place to hide out. The attics he finds invariably turn out to be in houses where strange things begin to occur. Events are strange but not very interesting, with the exception of The Tsunami Summoners. These are rocks washed up on the shore that turn into hairy, screeching monsters who bring disaster wherever they appear.

Monsters are the visual strong point in these stories. The Drifting Classroomwas an almost monster-free tale, with the visual excitement coming from scenes of elementary-age children going at one another with clubs and homemade spears, reverting to cannibalism, or dying in ways that ranged from bubonic plague to exposure. For The Cat Eyed Boy Umezu lets his monster-making talents run rampant. Creatures hop, scream, and travel in packs of one hundred. But the narratives remain bland, and the hero is not particularly engaging.

Scary One-legged Demon

Tsunami summoner about to go to work

Even the Cat Eyed Boy can have a bad day

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MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL. 11, by Kazuo Umezu

OK, I was wrong on this one. After Vol 10 I was saying the series had jumped the shark and was headed for an inevitable anti-climax. But I forgot one thing. It is Japanese.

Since this is the final volume, it would be easy to make these comments into Spoiler City. So I will just list a few stand out moments:

That arm is not connected to a body

1) Sixth graders confess their undying love for one another.
2) The school cafeteria man who will not die is finally done in by the severed arm and half the face of a character that I do no believe has made an appearance before this episode.
3) Sho's mom goes on national television to ask all the children of Japan to pray for the safe return of her son.
4) And only in Japan would you get a plot development that finds the first signs of hope for a new society in the plants that sprout from the corpses of the dead school kids scattered over the desert and around the campus.

Troy about the time of his role in The Drifting Classrom

Umezu's manga was originally serialized in the early 1970's. It is still the wildest ride of any of the manga series I have looked at. A film version was made in 1987, but I can find only snippets on Your Tube. It appears to take place at an international school, so half the dialog is in English and all the characters are turned into older teens. There are musical numbers. Troy Donahue plays one of the teachers. Did I just write that. Yes, Troy Donahue plays one of the teachers.

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL 10 by Kazuo Umezy

I am afraid this series jumped the shark some volumes back. This time round it's more clouds of toxic gas, more fights to the death between 10 year olds, more of what's becoming mundane for our long-suffering heros. There is one shocker after they reach Paradise, which turns out to be an old amusement park, but even it I had been predicting since the first volume. 

I thought Volume 10 finished the story, but no, there is more. One more volume that is going to have to be pretty spectacular to not to be an anti-climax.

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL. 9 by Kazuo Umezu

So what is the highlight of Vol 9?

A grown man slugging a ten-year-old girl in the face? No, that happens in just about every volume.

A revolt among one faction of the school that leads to dividing the buildings into enemy territories. No, that's been coming a long time.

The attack of the giant, flesh-eating starfish. Sorry, Umezo-san, you will have to try harder than that.

Sho's sudden attack of appendicitis? Really, after the bubonic plague outbreak some issues back, it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

The decision to operate on Sho using only an exacto knife and a pair of scissors? Now we're getting somewhere. Combine that with Sho's mother's mystic communication through the voice of the crippled girl who for some reason is suddenly near death, and you have one hell of an issue.

I can't believe there is only one volume more to go.

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 8 by Kazua Umezu

By the 8th volume it should come as no surprise that these kids just can't get a break. The maniacal cafeteria worker is back and taking charge. He sends Sho and his friends into the desert to dig a well -- yeah, sure. He abandons them in the pit. But they find a crack in the wall that leads them into the ruins of the Tokyo subway system. There they learn, through a convenient, ritual showing of an educational film for the mutant insect creatures who populate the underground, that Japan in the the late 20th century -- Umezu wrote these stories in the 1970's -- had so despoiled the land that women began giving birth to mutant babies, hence the insect creatures, and massive earthquakes buried their civilization. This is another lesson in eco-awareness from the country that gave us Godzilla Vs. the Smog Monster.

In a typical twist for Umezu, at the end of the installment the enormous spring of fresh water the kids discovers turns into an active volcano. Damn! Only two more installments to wind this thing up.

MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL 7 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom Vol. 7 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So far these kids have endured the following: The transportation of their elementary school to some future wasteland. A maniacal cafeteria worker. Homicidal teachers. Mass suicide among first graders. A giant bug that laid eggs that created little bugs. Pre-adolescent power struggles -- and those can get nasty. Bubonic plague.


Did I leave anything out? I must have.


In this installment, the rain that allowed their garden to grow brought with it a proliferation of mushrooms. Are they edible? Those who eat them experience strange feelings of power followed by dementia. The kids decide they should pray for help, and in one of the most non-American moments so far, one child asks, "Who should we pray to?"  They settle on a bust our hero, Sho, made of his mother in art class. Meanwhile the mushroom eaters make a one-eyed idol of mud who proves to be the more receptive deity and manifests itself as a tentacled monster.


Umezu's drawings are the most storyboard-like of any of the manga artists I've read. His action sequences, consisting almost entirely of dark pages with kids grappling, shattering wood, raised weapons, and close-ups of kids shouting "aaaargh" and "gyaaah" are genuinely exciting in their own ridiculous way. When Yoshikawa, formerly one of the good kids, eats mushrooms and goes down on all fours to scurry out of the schoolyard to her new god, it is genuinely creepy. Takamatsu, the cafeteria man, who has gone from a threat to a retarded man child, and now back to an incredible danger, looks like a deranged, overweight Desi Arnaz -- the very essence of horror.


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MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM VOL 6 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom Vol. 6 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Several volumes back in this series I was bothered that the elementary school students stranded in the future, their school building surrounded by a desert wasteland, were delighted to find they had a swimming pool full of water for their survival. What about chlorine? I wondered. How can Umezu ignore the chlorine issue.


Such concerns now strike me as petty. In this current installment, our hero Sho re-establishes the psychic link with his mother so that she can embed inside the corpse of a soon-to-be mummified baseball star the medicine the students need to combat the bubonic plague that threatens their existence. The mummy they happen to have found somewhere nearby in their future world.


So the whole chlorine thing no longer seems like such a big deal. I am curious still about certain behavioral traits of Sho's mom. During her single-minded pursuit to save her son, she gets punched several times in the face, although she is capable of giving as good as she gets. But are Japanese men and women so quick to slug one another? To get into the same hospital as the ailing baseball star she gashes her arm with a carving knife.


Meanwhile, the students who claim not to be suffering from Bubonic plague decide to burn down the building containing the stricken schoolmates. But the infection has spread everywhere and it is only the packet of medicine retrieved from the mummy's gut that saves the remaining students.


But with four pages of the book remaining, you know there is plenty of time for something really bad to happen. It does. The smoke from the fire, entering the cloud heavy atmosphere, combines with the celebratory group singing of the survivors to produce an effective rain dance and some much needed rain. Volume 6 ends with flash flooding and quicksand. But at least there is no chlorine in the rainwater.


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MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL 5 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 5 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Is it a known tendency among Japanese pre-adolescents to opt for blood sacrifice whenever they are faced with a really serious threat? As the tiny but deadly bugs that have hatched from the eggs of the big deadly bug attack them, one group decides it is all one little boy's fault and he must die. Our hero  Sho itervenes, but the intended victim bashes his owns brains out. The bugs disappear, so maybe he was to blame after all.

Next on the agenda is bubonic plague, and the controversy rages as to whom is infected and what to do with them -- chase them away, stab them with spears, or burn them with gasoline.

This tragedy is not bringing out anyone's best qualities. I thought volume 5 dragged a bit, but there were lots of great drawings of one or more child screaming "PLAGUE!"


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MANGA MANIA: DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 4 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 4 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A mass suicide among first graders convinces Sho he must set up the school as a nation. First he defeats Princess in a very close election, then he sets about establishing his cabinet He knows that the insect monster from the wastelands is soon to attack. The working out of just what this monster is is the most implausible portion of Umezu's story so far, although the use of the term "implausible" here must be relative.

Monster defeated, many lives lost, almost a return to normalcy in the Nation of Yamoto Elementary School, but unfortunately the monster has laid eggs and they are hatching. These kids just can't get a break.


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MANGA MANIA: DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 3 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 3 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The story becomes complicated by a parallel time episode involving Sho's mother. I suspect this will become a more common motif. Back at the school, enterprising pre-adolescents have decided that blood sacrifice is the way to solve their problem and they have picked out an unpopular kid for a victim. But there is a new boss in town, the leader of a girl gang who delivers possibly the best line ever spoken by a sixth-grader, "Mind your own fucking business. Bitch, no one calls me a gang leader.  If you've got to call me something call me Princess!"

And a giant insect monster is roaming the wasteland.


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MANGA MANIA: DRIFTING CLASSROOM Vol 2 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 2 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Things are getting worse for the children of Yamoto Elementary School. Not only has their school vanished into a sandy wasteland, but they must now contend with a power-mad cafeteria worker with visions of controlling the school by controlling the food supply. He is not above clubbing, stabbing, shooting, or incinerating students and faculty. While the students discover that the school has moved forward in time, one of their teachers begins a methodical murder campaign. A trip into the wastelands with the murderer ends with Sho and his friend discovering the buried city of Tokyo, and Sho makes a psychic connection with his mother still alive in the past.

Umezu's work is a distillation of everything that would frighten a child -- separation from parents, insane adults, no lunch --  without any of the sweetening that would go into the American version of such a story. In fact the kids are dropping like flies. Perhaps Umezu is trying to work his way down to a more reasonable quantity of characters for the eleven-book series.


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MANGA MANIA: THE DRIFTING CLASSROOM, VOL 1 by Kazuo Umezu

The Drifting Classroom, Vol. 1 by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Umezu is the best visual storyteller of the horror manga writers I've read, but I think I have found his stylistic weak point in The Drifting Classroom. The event the sends Yamato Elementary School into another dimension is part explosion, part earthquake, but truly otherworldly. In the real world, the campus has left an enormous cravasse in the town, but threre are no visible ruins of the school. The school itself seems to have survived undamaged a serious earthquake, until faculty and students realize that their campus is the only structure that exists in a landscape that could be called lunar except for the heavy cloud cover. All this Umezu narrates and depicts concisely with unsettling images. But for the range of emotions that his characters must be experiencing, he depicts them the most part as looking furious if not deranged.


The Japanese version of "tough love" might give Western proponents of the same reasons to rethink the technique. Sho is a sixth grader at the center of the tale. In the first chapter his mother purposely lets him sleep through his alarm as a lesson in responsibility. The ensuing fight escalates to the point that after he calls her a witch he leaves the house threatening never to return. His mother, surrounded by broken crockery, shouts after him, "Fine by me. You are no son of mine. I hope you never come back." Later, after the catastrophe, one male teacher's technique for calming the sobbing students is to grab a first grader and stab him in the arm with a shattered pair of glasses, shouting, "This is what will happen if you don't stop!" Since he has used his own son for the graphic demonstration, the situation blows over.


This is volume 1 of an 11 volume series, and most of the second half sets up characters and mysteries to be solved in subsequent installments. Older students are asked to keep younger students calm. First graders happily continue their group singing, but third graders prove to be a real threat. The teachers try lying to calm the students, but we know they are also capable of violence. The principal appears to have slept through the whole event until the last pages of the book. He shows up concerned that some one has stolen the month's paychecks. The cliffhanger ending introduces a power-mad cafeteria manager who realizes his chance to become most the important player in the days to come.


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MANGA MANIA: OROCHI: BLOOD by Kazuo Umezu

Orochi: Blood by Kazuo Umezu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Masters of the Horror Manga keep coming out of the woodwork. First there was Hideshi Hino -- master of the horror manga -- with his strangely sweet gorefests. Then the genuinely creepy Uzumaki by Jinjo Ito -- master of the horror manga. And now along comes Kazuo Umezu, you guessed it, the Master of the Horror Manga.

As much as I have enjoyed the others, I might have to go with Umezu. This starts out as a typical good sister/bad sister story, set in a mansion so large there are rooms no one has ever explored. When it seems that bad sister may be planning good sister's death, out from behind a curtain steps another little girl. She too lives in the house, but no one is aware of her. She watches the family but is basically helpless to intervene. Twenty years pass, the sisters marry, still Orochi, the kid from behind the curtain, travels back and forth between them to watch their disintegrating marriages.

But Orochi gets sleepy and may sleep for a century. She doesn't, and then things get really strange.

Umezu designs better pages than Hino or Ito, and tells a pretty scary story without a lot of shock effects. This is of course part of a series, which implies that perhaps Orochi's first entrance from behind the curtain is not so unexpected to Umezu's devoted followers.

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