Every sibling gave off an uneasy vibe, and watching each one of them unfold until they displayed their psychotic side had me on the edge. I think the story about a group of twisted siblings trying to make contact with the spirits of their dead parents was pretty neat, but all of the other ones were quite forgettable in my opinion. His longest work, the three-volume Uzumaki, is about a town's obsession with spirals: people become variously fascinated with, terrified of, and consumed by the countless occurrences of the spiral in nature. The next two tales are about "The Strange Hikizuri Siblings," a weird and off-putting family of nasty and spiteful orphans.

Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Collection | Book by Junji Ito

The Mansion of Phantom Pain” is another example of Ito’s conceptual brilliance, with a starkly brutal ending.The latter – about a girl who has ribs removed to achieve a perfect waistline, only to find herself haunted by plaintive music – is particularly gripping and creepy. Some of the plots and panels are rather over the top but in the end, they still look fitting and sense-making. A woman pregnant with the child of a married man stopped him at a crossroads and asked him if she and her boyfriend would live happily ever after.

Lovesickness by Junji Ito | Goodreads

The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. The way Midori is written out of the story also feels arbitrary; as a character that was little more than the wingman for Ryūsuke's foggy excursions, I kept hoping for a little more nuance, but in the end she has little bearing on the story's outcome. When he decided to check up on his friend's aunt the next day, he learned she had committed suicide. It's a new set of spooky tales in the Mieruko-chan Anthology Comic, including works from Michiru Noroi, Yakan Nabeya, Aki Mizuki, and more! Before Uzumaki, Ito was best known for Tomie, a comic series about a beautiful, teasing and eternally youthful high school girl who inspires her stricken admirers to murder each other in fits of jealous rage.Nick and Nicky discuss their favorite horror series and compare notes on which anime monsters are perfect for the . As much as I enjoy Junji Ito, and will keep reading these collections as they get translated, I never quite get used to just how abrupt some of the stories’ endings are. The latter portion of the manga follows a separate storyline of a very bizarre set of orphaned siblings who like to play pranks and mentally torture the people in their lives, and while I didn't enjoy this story as much as I did the Lovesickness plot, it was still fun, weird, and highly entertaining.

Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Collection - Wikipedia

As a horror manga, Lovesickness follows many of the same conventions found in traditional Japanese horror stories. The first two stories are the usual dark, horror, excellence with some amazingly gory imagery in The Rib Woman.I think the concept of "lovesickness" being a literal type of transmitted disease that drives young girls violently insane with lustful obsession is fascinating. It’s hard to avoid the feeling that the guiding principle was, ‘hmmm, ‘Lovesickness’ is a bit short to publish by itself, what else can we cobble together to make this a full book? There follows a couple of linked black comedy stories following Narumi and her five super freaky siblings . The townspeople have an old folk superstition: if you go to a crossroads, and ask the first person to appear to tell your fortune, the prediction will come true.

Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Collection - Waterstones

The siblings have intense, psychotic personalities, making it one of the most dysfunctional families I've ever encountered in fiction.

The entire atmosphere of the main story is what really held me; it was eerie and unsettling in a very subtle way, with brief bursts of that in-your-face horror some people love. Finally, there’s ‘Memories of Real Poop’ (yes, really – also known as ‘A Shit to Remember’, which is a much better title, come on! One consequence explored with Nazumi's sensationalized suicides is that teenaged girls become obsessed with the mysterious bishounen in black, effectively turning him into a celebrity figure. This is the premise of his popular work Uzumaki (which is getting an anime adaptation this year) and is explored on a more apocalyptic scale with Gyo and Remina. He spends multiple chapters attempting to thwart the Handsome Ghost or pin him down, but the story's conclusion ultimately feels unsatisfying after hundreds of pages of build-up.