MayaGay

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Reading a lot of Junji Ito cause tis the season. I got Tombs and Lovesickness from the library this week. One of the funnier things about his work is how much it relies on a variation on "have you heard about this strange custom in this town? yeah it's the most fucked up thing to ever happen. hope it's not you!" The extra funny part is that the probability of it working for me or not is about the same as a coin flip.

The titular story in Tombs, for instance, struck me as strangely poignant. I like the guilt of the hit and run seeping into the lives of the two siblings, and the ways that turned to paranoia as the plot went on. A kind of riff on The Tell Tale Heart, but with the supernatural becoming literal instead of psychological. Even just the image of the corpses turning into tombs is powerful, and the final reveal of the family is chilling in a way Ito often misses in his attempt to find scary. Thoroughly enjoyed.

On the other hand, you have the setup of Lovesickness and it's crossroads fortune obsessed town. Maybe it's just the fact it's a longer story, I probably would think better of the whole thing if it was just the first chapter. But it draws out the entire thing so much that not only does the metaphor lose it's punch but the meat and potatoes scares are lessened as well. I much rather would have read him expanding more on "The Bizarre Hikizuri Siblings," which seemed like his version of The Addams Family. His attempt at humor is sometimes real hit and miss (One of the stories in Tombs, "The Window Next Door," feels like an attempt at horror comedy that missed me completely. He really is the Japanese Stephen King, and that's his Lawnmower Man. {The short story about a goat man eating a lawn, not the Pierce Brosnan VR movie, though that is a classic in it's own right!}) but the Hikizura Siblings grabbed me. I'd check in on their miserable adventures every week.

I'm planning on getting his version of Frankenstein next time I go to the library, which I have read before and consider one of the best adaptations of Shelley's novel, as well as his illustrated version of No Longer Human. Maybe I'll even read Uzumaki for the upteenth time. This is what spooky season is all about, after all.


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