MANGA MANIA: ULTRA GASH INFERNO by Suehiro Maruo

If your own nightmares have not been up to par of late, I recommend you take a look at this book. Suehiro Maruo (B. 1956) is the master of ero-guro (erotic grotesque) manga. I first read his book-length work Mr. Arashi's Amazing Freak Show. It was an outrageous grand guignol of misery, weirdness, and degradation. But compared to Ultra Gash Infrerno, it was Saturday matinee material.

This volume contains nine stories from the 1980's to 1993. Possibly they have been chosen for English translation to give the uninitiated an extreme immersion into Maruo's world. Or they may be typical. Titles like "Putrid Night," "Shit Soup", and "Voyeur in the Attic" let you know what you are getting in for. I doubt that characters like Spiderman and The Hulk need fear being replaced by Sewer Boy or The Great Masturbator in the hearts of the American reading public. 

 Maruo's work is elegantly drawn and according to commentators has its roots in everything from 1930's Japanese children's books to atrocity prints of the 19th century. I'll have to take their word for it. He excels in gore, sex, and combinations of the two. Female characters endure sex acts that leave them bloodied and injured, but they are capable of graphic revenge. Typical plot points include eyes gouged out, limbs lopped off, and wounds opened for reasons I will leave to your imagination. For me the scatology and coprophilia were the most disturbing elements. Moments of "Sewer Boy" struck me as merely disgusting. But maybe that is because it is the second story in the book and I hadn't yet been mentally whipped into submission. The essentially plotless "Shit Soup," on the other hand, was a beautifully rendered nightmare of degrading, repulsive images. Often with this sort of material, when I have encountered it in films, anime, or books, I have asked myself, "Is this trip really necessary?" I think to say something like, "Maruo's elegance and economy of style elevates his material to the realm of poetry," risks making one sound ridiculous. But I never felt he was asking me to wallow in filthy junk. I never felt like some teenager getting a thrill from watching Faces of Death.

"Non-Resistance City" (1993) is the longest story in the book. It take place during the Americanoccupation, a time Maruo did not experience first hand but he would have known from the films of Shohei Imamura, Nagisa Oshima, and the photography of Daido Moriyama. Maruo's story chronicles rape, social degradation, and ultimately cannibalism. It also contains an evil dwarf, a type of character he used often. 

Maruo's is a dark grotesque that reminds me of when Joel Peter Witkin first seemed like he was going to be a serious artist. Witkin isn't holding up over time. I am curious to see more of Maruo.

MANGA MANIA: MR. ARASHI'S AMAZING FREAK SHOW by Suehiro Maruo

She later appeared on Japan's Got Talent

Maybe this had been too exuberantly recommended. It also makes me realize that even when reading manga or graphic novels I am expecting as much in the way of narrative as I am visuals. 

Is there a story here? Sure. Midori is an orphaned child taken up by the owner of a failing freak show. She is sexually and physically abused. When she takes in three abandoned puppies, one of the performers, a woman whose talent appears to involve nothing more than sitting naked in a bucket of snakes, discovers Midori's puppies, stomps them to death and serves them in a stew. Midori's apparent savior is a midget magician whose act involves crawling into and out of a large jar with an impossibly small opening. Although the new act can save the freak show, Mr. Arashi, the owner, runs off with the money and the performers go their separate ways. Midori's midget lover has her wait on the train platform while he goes to get some food. He is stabbed while stealing. Midori is more alone than ever. (According to the book jacket. this is a retelling of a classic Japanese tale. I haven't tried to track it down.)

Maruo overuses the tongue-to-eyeball motif

Sorry, should I have warned of spoilers? Why bother? The story is nothing, much of it a dream or a hypnotically induced hallucination. Fans go to Maruo for the arwowrk, which is outrageous and spectacular. Maruo has a flair for perversity. Midori's rape by the puss-filled mummy man is a visual high point. So as you can imagine this is not likely to be to everyone's taste. And yet glancing through promotions for Maruo's other works, this might be one of his tamer offerings.

Midori and her midget beau have a night on the town

Midori has a moment of clarity

MANGA MANIA: Lullabies from Hell by Hideshi HIno

More icky fun from the most visceral of all manga artists.  

A child raised by demented parents goes from torturing animals and self mutilation to murdering his enemies by depicting their deaths in his drawings. (Hino's protagonists are often artists.) A woman gives birth to a lizard in a story that could all be a fantasy devised by her manga artist husband. This story has an environmental message that never quite rises to the sophistication of Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. In the third story, three children visit the countryside alone. They travel by train and return to find their world has become a nightmare complete with abandoned amusement parks and homicidal parents.

The final story, "Zoruko's Strange Disease," has that combination of physical repulsiveness and eerie grace that makes HIno more than just a master of gross-out horror. A socially outcast child, loved only by his mother, develops a degenerative disease that reduces hims to a pustule-infected monstrosity. Abandoned in a house deep in the forest, he uses the blood and ichor of his boils to paint strangely beautiful pictures. When the villagers decide to kill him before the spring thaw causes his putrid odor to once again fill the village, they discover a mystery that is simultaneously melancholy and lovely.

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.

  

GLOSSARY (6)

akabon -- "red book"; an early form of manga named for its red covers

benshi -- live narrators who accompanied silent films

butai -- a miniature stage

chibi -- little or super deformed characters for comedic effect

denki kamishibai -- "electric paper theater," i.e., television

genbaku no ko -- children of the bomb

gesaku -- playful stories

hentai -- sexually perverted subject matter

kamishibai -- street theater using painted illustrations

kawaii -- cute

kyokan -- a group spirit formed by listening to kamishibai

maido -- French maid outfits

mukashi mukashi -- a long, long time ago

pika-don -- the atomic bomb

rori-kon -- Lolita-style

tanuki -- badger spirit

tokko -- thought police

yaoi -- a popular genre of homoerotic comics

yamato damashii -- the spirit of Japan

waraie -- giggle pix

Selected from the glossary to Manga Kamishibai, The Art of Japanese Paper Theater

by Eric P. Nash

Abrams Comic Arts, 2009

MANGA MANIA: NON NON BA by Shigeru Mizuki

This is Japanese folklorist and manga artist Shigeru Mizuki's memoir of his 1930's childhood in the small coastal town of Sakaiminato. The small boys of the town play constantly at war, staging pitched battles with rocks and traps aimed at enemies across town. Shigeru, an artist at heart, befriends the elderly woman who lives near by and she regales him with stores of Yokai, the demon spirits, sometimes playful and sometimes dangerous, that fill the houses and surrounding countryside of Sakaiminato. When Non Non Ba's husband dies and she can no longer care for herself, she moves in with Mizuki's family. His father is a dreamer and very poor businessman, frequently fired from his low level jobs at banks and sales firms and a failure in his attempt to open the first local movie theater. Shigeru's mother, resentful of her reduced circumstances, repeats tiresomely that her family was allowed to use a last name and own a sword before her marriage to her deadbeat husband.

The creatures Non Non Ba describes in her stories are real. Shigeru feels their presences, at times he can see them, and in at least one instance he befriends a yokai, a disheveled monster who scatters adukii beans in the attic. In later life Mizuki would become famous as an creator of yokai manga, but despite the creatures pervasive presence in Non Non Ba, this novel is as much about pre WW II life in s small town as it is about folklore. The pretend wars Shigeu's friends "play" are vicious and the rules are as draconian and unreasonable as those he would later expose among the Japanese Imperial Army in his anti-war masterpiece, Onward to our Glorious Deaths,His father is a gentle but tragic character, and his mother is both comic and pathetic in her inability to let go of what she sees as her glorious past. The child's life is surrounded by tragedy. A young girl from Tokyo who is cared for by Non Non Ba dies of tuberculosis. The seemingly respectable family who moves to town in fact deals in selling young girls to distant geisha houses. 

Mizuki's interweaving of the fantastic and the everyday is seamless and convincing, and his story is gentle and moving. A twelve-mile hike to taste the first doughnuts brought to this remote area of Japan is as entertaining as a trip to an undersea cave to witness a yokai floor show.

In Mizuki's hometown Sakaiminato, sculptures of Yokai
line the road to the railway station. This is the
Wall Yokai, admittedly not one of the more
frightening variety.

This Yokai is so frightening it has cause Shigura and
Non Non Ba to speak Spanish

MANGA MANIA: BLACK JACK by Osamu Tezuka

Black Jack is the manga series from the creator of Astro Boy that is most popular among adult readers.

I don't know what that really means. These stories of a mysterious surgeon, a young man whose hair is part white and part black and whose faces is marked by a diagonally stitched scar, are perhaps somewhat more sophisticated than some of Tezuka's other work, but there is nothing particularly adult about them. Black Jack is an unlicensed surgeon who charges outrageously high fees and insists on working alone in the operating room. He accomplishes the seemingly impossible, and he is not above a certain level of deception. In this first volume we get his back story -- he own hopelessly shattered body was saved by a remarkable surgeon. We also learn that the one true love of his life has been forced to live her life as a man since he removed her womb when she had cervical cancer. These stories were written in the 1970's, so that bit of biological determinism is completely indefensible as a sign of its times. Jack's assistant is a little girl with the mind of a young woman. She was a vestigial twin rescued from the body of an 18 year old. She is also quite irritating.

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: ONWARDS TOWARDS OUR NOBLE DEATHS by Shigeru Musiki

Shigeru Mizuki (b. 1922) is something of a national treasure in Japan. His innovative manga titles place him the same league as Osamu Tezuki, the artist referred to as the God of Manga. Mizuki made his name with manga involving Yokai, the sometimes playful, sometimes malevolent demons of Japanese folklore. In 1973 he published this magnificent anti-war tale. I have read several manga that are billed as "adult" in content, but this usually means the stories are more sexual or grotesquely violent than other, more mainstream offerings. Onwards Towards Our Noble Deaths is the first manga I have read where the adult label applies to material that is morally complex and emotionally devastating. It deserves a place with such Japanese anti-war classics as Kon Ichikawa's film Fires on the Plain(1959). And western readers should not look on this tale of moral depravity among the Imperial Army's officer class with too much smug superiority. It is a story of soldiers forced in to a suicide mission, a mission that initially fails and therefore must be repeated because the glorious sacrifice of the soldiers has already been reported. The twisted logic and gross disregard for human life is apalling, but remember that Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory (1957) involves the execution of French soldiers for cowardice after their refusal to follow a clearly suicidal order. That setting is World War One.

Mizuki's was assigned to the battalion described in his story, and would have died had he not lost an arm in a previous fight some weeks before the final orders came through. Mizuki depicts the New Guinea setting as a combination of tropical paradise and absolute hell hole. Soldiers are starving, dying of malaria, and lining up seventy-men deep for the attention of the handful of comfort women their officers have provided them. Important work on camp construction can be delayed for days while soldiers search for the remains of a comrade almost certainly eaten by a crocodile. But the officers insist that remains must be returned for proper burial. A severely wounded soldier has his finger cut off by a shovel so the body part can be returned to his family. As his friends leave with the grisly trophy, the soldier, who is mortally wounded, is still alive and suffering.

Japan has lost the war at this point. Fire bombings of major cities has begun and Hiroshima is not far in the future. The insane logic of the suicide mission is the outcome of the rigid training of an officer class who treat their soldiers as fodder. The criminal insanity of forcing the men to return after they survive the first assault will leave readers enraged.

MANGA MANIA: APOLLO'S SONG by Osamu Tezuka

Osamu Tezuka published this in 1970, shortly after Japan authorized sex education for teenagers. Much of what seems peculiar about the story today was therefore taboo-busting when it originally came out. In the prologue, 500 million anthropomorphic sperm race for a single egg, personified as a queen in a diaphanous gown. (Try to read this without thinking of Woody Allen.) The single winner loses his tail and disappears with the queen into the womb to create an embryo, defined by Tezuka as "...the mark of love, truth, and sincerity between man and woman, male and female."

This arch tone makes the occasional reappearance in the next 500 pages, but the story comes down to earth with the introduction of Shogo, a typically androgynous hero (I'm not androgynous, I'm just drawn that way.) Shogo has landed in the psych ward for torturing animals. Because of his bar hostess mother, he associates love with violence. The story will combine his real life adventures with dreams induced by shock therapy, hypnosis, or a serious crack on the head received when the angry boyfriend of a woman training Shogo to compete in marathons runs him off a mountain road. If you can make sense of that last bit, it accurately describes an incident in Apollo's Song.

Osamu Tezuka is commonly referred to as the God of Manga, and that he may be. His drawing style, however, is a period piece by more contemporary standards. His secondary characters are cartoons with funny faces. HIs sophistication shows only in his page construction and the wildness of his narratives. This edition comes with a quote from Publishers Weekly: "His work deals with the most profound questions of human existence." I suspect that statement was written to accompany his series on Buddha and not something like Apollo's Song.

Osamu Tezuka 1970
Woody Allen 1972

I'm not androgynous. I'm just drawn that way

MANGA MANIA: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVER SERVICE, VOLS. 7 & 8

Otaku culture takes center stage in the first story. "Otaku" are obsessive fans of anything ranging from manga to movie stars to the internet, an obsession that in its most extreme form keeps those obsessed confined largely to their rooms or certain sites that cater to their obsessions. The KCDS staff meet up with robotics enthusiasts who slip into arcane, for me at least, squabbles about the niceties of robot history. The scene shifts to The Broadband Center, a multi-story emporium catering to otaku needs. This is a thinly veiled version of a real shrine to otaku culture, the Nakano Broadway building. Various plot streams come together when a corpse-powered robot runs berserk. Then we are served up with a tale of plastic surgery designed to transform Japanese ladies into the image of an obscure star. (Apparently there was a period when Japanese women were actually undergoing surgeries to look like Audrey Hepburn.) Again, this being the KCDS, things are not what they seem with these surgeries. Participants become possessed by jimenso, scary little faces of the deceased star that appear behind their new pointy ears. When the source of the ears is discovered, readers are treated to one of Otsuka's most grotesque images to date.

The longest episode in Volume 7 finds the crew employed on a movie set. The elderly, senile director is a parody of the Japanese master filmmaker Kon Ichikawa, who died at the age of 92 a couple years after this was published. Kon made some of the bleakest anti-war films ever and produced Tokyo Olympiad on the 1964 games. This homage to Leni Riefenstahl made some people uncomfortable. His later films became more commercial, but why Otsuka singles him out for this cruel parody is unclear. The plot involves, of course, multiple murders, body parts showing up as props, and reanimated corpses.

Volume 8 tells three of Otsuka's best stories.

The first tale is ghost story with a gentler tone than this series is known for. But Otsuka is back in form for the next two tales. In both of these he follows his favorite theme of how history and folk traditions find their way into modern Japanese culture.

Kaneari, an obnoxious, wealthy, trendsetting wedding planner, is the malevolent force in the second story. He lives the ultimate playboy lifestyle, and the men of the KCDS meet him when they deliver at 40,000,000 yen refrigerator to his apartment. (Correct me if I am wrong, but there is no such thing as a refrigerator that costs around $500K.) Sasaki, the most entrepreneurial of the KCDS, takes an interest in Kaneari's new service, arranged marriages among the deceased. This was an actual practice in parts of Japan, where those who died before they were married could be married to one another for very Japanese reasons explained in the notes but that I will not try to explain here. Of course there proves to be something very fishy and supernatural going on. The drawings made for a shinto shrine to commemorate these events have to power to hasten the demise of the still living halves of the ceremony. The climax is one of the best revenge nightmares ever as Kaneari and his party animal friends receive surprise visits from dead but very angry young women, all dressed as traditional Japanese brides. Kinky and cool.

The final story introduces the disturbing Japanese tradition of the josanbu, midwives willing to kill unwanted babies at birth. The story also involves the introduction of "baby drops" at Tokyo hospitals. These are places where a person can anonymously leave unwanted children. (Similar experiments have taken place in the U.S. In one Kansas City incident, a single father brought all nine of his children to the hospital.) There is also a mysterious stand of unused lockers with magical properties and more information on how Japanese corpses are cleaned for burial than you might want to know. On the upside, it could be that Karatsu has met his true love.

MANGA MANIA: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE VOL 6 by Eiji Otsuka

Volume Six is a bit bland for this series.

Past volumes have included such explosive episodes of Japanese history as the biological weapons devision of WW II and the Nanking massacre. This go round, the topical issue is the privatization of the postal service initiated in 2007 by outgoing prime minister Junichiro Koizumi. This causes a not particularly interesting development in the delivery service's business model.

Things get back in gear when Numata moves into an apartment with a suspiciously low rent. It turns out to be the scene of not one but two crimes. This narrative is interrupted by a gaiden. Gaiden are side stories that may have information eventually relevant to the main narrative or serve as historical side pieces. This one takes place in the Meiji period, concerns the serial killings of prostitutes, and uses a motif I first encountered on the TV series Thriller when I was in elementary school.

Spectacularly lurid images enliven the text, but less often than usual. The notes, of Disject Membra.  are entertaining and exhaustive as ever although even here the English language editors allow themselves a small vacation.  The topic concerns an early 20th century academic debate over the nature of Japan's prehistoric inhabitants. After stating the barest outline of the controversy, the note ends

...actually there were other differences as well, but unusually for Disjecta Membra, we are not going to get into it.

In this series, every life has a second act

MANGA MANIA: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE by Eiji Ohtsuka

The creators of this series seem determined to pick at every scab of 20th century Japanese history. In Vol. 4 it was Unit 731, the infamous biological warfare initiative from WWII. This time. the Kurosagi team gets involved in tracking down the truth about a small village supposedly wiped out by a mass murderer many years before. The murderer turns out to have been on of the perpetrators of the Nanking massacre, the Japanese mass murders and rapes in a Chinese city in 1937. Returning home with an extreme form of PTSD, the man kills his entire village. Hardly social commentary, but still an approach to surprising, sensitive subject matter.

There is also something about a body in a mummy case and a really funny episode about the cryogenic industry that allows author and artist to cut loose with the grisly fun. 

As always, the notes are informative and useful.

Disgruntled Customers

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

flag

MANGA MANIA: THE KUROSAGI CORPSE DELIVERY SERVICE VOL 4, by Eiji Otsuka

Each volume of this series finds out heroes desperate to make some cash and willing to accept most any work that will bring in a paycheck. In Vol. 4, they are signed on to help a destitute Japanese village become the Roswell, New Mexico, of Japan. While the three guys make crop circles litttle Makino checks out the supposed mummified alien corpse discovered by villagers fifty years ago. It is clearly the corpse of a monkey, but Kuratsu discovers an alien being trapped in the corpse, and so the teams sets to work.

As usual with this series, each episode takes on topical subjects in outrageous fashion, One of those touring exhibitions of plasticized human bodies leads the team into a hotbed of perverted science relating back to Unit 731, the WW II Japanese biological warfare initiative whose existence the nation denied until the 1990's. The wildest story involves the illegal imports for the exotic bug market which is causing an outbreak of suicides among collectors infected by a parasite that lives in a particularly desirable and illegal snail. The parasite does quite a number on its host's eyes and makes them want to fly. The results are predictably disastrous but it is all just nature taking its course.

The dialog throughout is profane and funny, and the visuals are consistently grotesque. Unfortunately I could find nothing from Vol 4 on the internet to reinforce that last statement.

MANGA MANIA: PARASYTE Vol 7 by Hitoshi Iwaaki

Another volume, another blood bath. This time it does not involve a high school. Humans are onto the parasyte infiltration of municipal government, and they plan a raid to determine just who is infected. For some reason they think it is a good idea to bring in a necrophiliac serial killer with a talent for spotting aliens to help. But you just can't trust those necrophiliac serial killers. 

We also learn that not all parasytes are created equal. Some are tougher than others, especially those who look like a G.I. Joe. They can absorb bullets and spit them back at you. 

In the concluding portions of this volume, at last love comes to Shinichi. And Migi, the parasyte inhabiting his right hand, has been sleeping more than usual but wakes up to work out a spectacular escape for the climax.