[	Tags	|	books	]
[	Current Location	|	The Office	]
[	mood	|	good	]
[	music	|	NUMBER ONE by Lightspeed Champion	]

THE HORROR MANGA OF JUNJI ITO

With horror maven Junji Ito’s manga being reissued by VIZ in brand new English-language editions, now is the perfect time to get acquainted, or re-acquainted, with his work. His ideas alone defy easy description, achieving practically hallucinogenic levels of surreality long before you’ve seen the grotesque, stunning artwork he uses to bring them to life.

Indeed, Ito’s premises are so absurd that logic insists they should be funny. One section of GYO presents us with a group of citizens stricken with a mysterious disease, uncontrollably belching and farting as they wander the streets of their city--until a set of robotic insect legs clomps along and carts them off like stray dogs, running vacuum tubes into their butts and down their throats to harness the escaping gas as fuel. Logic would suggest that this scene should, at the very least, induce a befuddled giggle. Or perhaps an ironic “high comedy” chuckle, as in “ah yes, such a telling commentary on the nature of the industrial blah blah blah…” But Ito knows how to present these concepts so that they dive straight past your mental defenses, the way nightmares do, and his images make short work of any humor involved: These bloated corpselike things, eyes pearly white, bodies lifeless with infection, violated and piled like so much chaff onto the spine-like chassis of a parasitic mechanical insect...you’ll wish you could somehow shake the picture back out of your brain.

Ito’s equally deft at encompassing concepts that become frightening precisely because of their nebulousness, as illustrated by UZUMAKI, his most famous series. This set of linked stories concerns a town whose locals gradually become obsessed with spirals, accompanied by spiral-themed descents into madness and mutation. There is no monster to fight, no disease to cure, no demon to exorcise--only the image of the spiral, at once simple and horribly impalpable, gradually overtaking the minds of the townspeople, and finally their bodies. One character’s father commits suicide by forcing himself into the shape of a spiral. A spiral-shaped scar on a girl’s forehead eventually grows into a devouring vortex that consumes her eyes, her head, her legs... Like the best work of Lovecraft and Blackwood, even the notion of UZUMAKI is unsettling, presenting a horror that manifests itself in the world at large, but originates somewhere in the sticky corridors of the mind, and descends back there once it’s been introduced into your cognitive bloodstream.

To make matters more impressive, Ito wrangles these premises together using surprisingly straightforward plotting. His manga unfold with a queasy internal logic, dragging the reader along like a runaway train.  In fact, the stories are so well-crafted that they maintain their effectiveness even after repeated exposures--you'll savor the darkening mood and the cringe-inducing artwork each time…and you'll secretly hope that you will eventually develop an immunity.