Museum of Terror 3 (2006)
by Junji Ito
Don’t expect something similar to Gyo or Uzumaki, Ito’s short work is much less impressive than his longer stories. Partly it’s due to the length of the pieces. The impact of Uzumaki, for example, comes from the cumulation of single stories all involving a common element that makes them pieces of a bigger tapestry, which allows Ito to explore the characters and the ideas (and its consequences) with much more depth and to flesh out the details. Here we have disconnected pieces that stand alone and don’t have the same cumulative force. The characters and ideas remain underdeveloped, and very often it feels like the author is telling us what’s horrifying, instead of showing it to us (like he did so eloquently in Gyo or Uzumaki). Also the stories are far too often formulaic and have generic endings (or endings that feel as if Ito didn’t knew how the end it properly and just stopped).
As this is only one of the early volumes of the 15-part collection of his short work, I wonder if his later short work improved much. That’s not to say this collection is bad, it’s an interesting read, but in comparison to Gyo or Uzumaki much weaker.
Rating: 3/5
Uzumaki (1998-1999)
by Junji Ito
Take a simple concept (a spiral), make people obsessed about it and tell seemingly disconnected stories about people in a small town going nuts over the spiral pattern in all the variations it can turn up in nature, humans or artificial things. Then crank up the pace, until you have a small apocalypse engulfing the small town, with no one able to leave (entering from the outside is still possible). I saw the movie some years ago, that covered most of the first volume, and while it was interesting, it couldn’t capture the spirit of this brilliant manga. Like Gyo this is an endlessly inventive horror manga that starts out slowly and subtly, then picks up the pace and uses in-your-face shock effects and fast action and yet still remains dreadful and disturbing in subtle way up to the end. Uzumaki is quite unlike anything else, a rare find in our world, where seemingly every idea has been done already.
Rating: 5/5
Gyo (2001-2002)
by Junji Ito
Gyo begins harmless enough, which an overwhelming stench that bothers the girlfriend of main char Tadashi. The cause, a small, walking fish. If the best of science fiction can draw upon the often mentioned experience of Sense of Wonder, then the best horror evokes something similar, an overwhelming Sense of Dread or Terror. Gyo is the best example for that, both the art and the writing start with small things, that nevertheless make you feel like they are omen of something really dreadful lurking around the corner. And Ito is actually someone who can follow that up and show us the full horror in graphical detail.
What starts with a small fish turns out to be an invasion of sea creatures. Sharks hunting people on land, beaches overrun by hordes of stinking fish of all size coming out of the ocean. But that isn’t where everything stops. While Gyo is horror, there are also SF elements, explaining what the reason for the walking fish might be. But that is just used to crank up the horror. Once the fish are on land, they’ll die because they can’t breath. Still, even in death they walk on, which is one of the reasons for the awful stench, they’re actually rotting corpses walking. But it’s not just a simple variation on zombie-stories, far from it. There are germs and they can infect across species. You’ll probably can see where this is going, but there also the walking contraptions the fish use. Which provides for some truly weird pictures later on, when the whole worlds has sled into a full blown apocalypse.
Horror, it is sometimes said, is best when the monster can only be seen out of the corner of the eye, a full view of whatever is lurking around will turn out to be much too mundane to induce the same terror. Gyo is the best proof that sometimes, if you have a really inventive talent at work whose art and writing match perfectly, that full view can turn out to be even more dreadful.
Rating: 5/5
Boku no Futatsu no Tsubasa (2003-2005)
by Toshiki Yui
fan-translated by various Groups
If a known hentai creator makes a manga about a young hermaphrodite who is slowly discovering his sexuality, most people wouldn’t really expect a serious coming-of-age story that gives the theme a serious treatment. And as far as BnFnT is concerned, they are mostly right. While the sex is most of the time off-screen, it’s there and how the character in BnFnT jump onto each other has nothing to do with realistic human behavior and more with how people in porn go at it. Still, at least it’s entertaining in the typically lighthearted manner of Toshiki and not really offensive. The science fiction tag is for the reason that later it turns out that the main character is the offspring of a human-alien liaison (the aliens are all hermaphrodites (but still look like humans)) and with that fact revealed the story completely leaves any pretension of seriousness behind. The ending also leaves something to be desired in it’s rather terse attempt to close the story.
Rating: 3/5
Kagome Kagome (2000-2001)
by Toshiki Yui
fan-translated by Manga Translation
Three volume manga by Toshiki Yui that, untypically for him, contains elements of horror. Problem is, Toshiki’s manga so far have been on the lighter side of things, most of his early stuff was fluffy and light hentai (porn). Some of his more recent stuff tries to avoid outright porn, maybe this is an attempt to remake himself into more of a mainstream creator. Still, Toshiki so far lacks the sensibilities for creating true horror and whenever you get the feeling something truly horrible could happen he remedies that by making some of his characters say something non-serious or make non-serious faces. This truly makes it hard to take the more serious elements of the story serious. Still, it’s okay entertainment, Toshiki knows how to string his readers along. The ending is a complete deus ex-machina, but since the story that came before lacked real impact, it’s not really that annoying.
Rating: 3/5
Uncivilized Planet
by Jiro Matsumoto
fan-translated by Omanga, Band of the Hawks and Kotonoha
There’s fiction that tries to convey a positive attitude for life and everything. And then there’s stuff like UP. UP is a real study of misery, each of the three main characters get repeatedly the wrong end of the stick: rape, torture and other misfortunes happen again and again to them. And two of those three also become rather bitter rivals. While I’m not per se against such stuff, most of it is very dreary to read and becomes boring (like UP), since making something so depressing also an enthralling read is hard. UP also suffers from the fact that it isn’t clear where the whole story takes place. Is it Earth, or another world? We never know, and for something that is striving to tell a story as serious as this, separating it from the real world makes it rather surreal and weakens the impact considerably. Also it makes me feel like the author has rigged the setting to get the maximum of suffering out of his characters, which is just a slight bit too manipulative for my taste. Makes me remember Saikano, which had the same issues and was just as dreary and pointless.
Rating: 1/5
Tropical Citron (2001)
by Jiro Matsumoto
fan-translated by Omanga and Band of the Hawks
The main strength of TC is not the core plot, that is actually the common man from our world enters another world and plays the role of the saviour, freeing the people of the other world from an evil creature. The difference to that common template lies in the execution, in TC the evil that has gained control of the other world is seemingly none other than the rabbit from Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (I could be wrong, it might also be an allusion to something else). And the other world is just a crazy variation of the present of the main characters point of departure from our world. Which are some rundown Japanese suburbs during the era of the Vietnam war. All the things you’ll expect from that time surface in TC, drugs, sex and hippie sensibilities.
At times TC is a rather confusing read, always evoking the feeling that the whole thing is just a drug dream the main character has and not the real stuff. It’s interesting, but I didn’t find the story itself as compelling as the crazy setting and style implied it might be, which might be due to the way it is told. Still, the art is excellent.
Rating: 2/5
Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko (1994-2006)
by Hitoshi Ashinano
YKK has no real plot and yet it’s completely engrossing. YKK takes place in an undefined future, where the human race is slowly fading out. Something big must have happened, because the sea levels have risen significantly and most places seem slightly depopulated. The main difference to other post-apocalyptic stories is that neither have humans lost all technology and reverted back to some tribal societies, nor is there any evidence for widespread war and mayhem. It seems, people have just gone back to simpler ways of living (without giving up their technological knowledge) and accepted that humanity is at an end.
The main character is actually a robot, mentally and physically a young girl, who is slowly growing up and exploring the world around her. That’s actually the whole plot and while that may seem very simple (which it is), it’s actually very well done. There are no big twists, nothing more than Alpha, the robot girl, going around, meeting people and watching the world. And yet, very much helped by the excellent art, it’s this simplicity that allows the manga to concentrate on evoking a solemn mood, celebrating the simple life, the beauty of nature and the beauty of living throughoutly in peace with your environment.
There are also very small touches of sadness, the people around Alpha growing up and becoming older, while she remains the same. I must admit that I also don’t like the idea of humanity slowly and peacefully fading out, but just this time I think it worked so well and was done with so much care, that it didn’t bother much at all. And it’s neat to see a post-apocalyptic future where humanity seems to have matured and not gone wholly Mad Max. Above all, what we see is just one viewpoint, and the behavior of humans displayed in YKK seems a much better fit to recover from whatever disaster has struck Earth and the human civilization, than the more commonly displayed behavior of humans in other post-apocalyptic outings.
Rating: 5/5
Samurai Executioner (1972-1976)
by writer Kazuo Koike and artist Goseki Kojima
Samurai Executioner is about Yamada Asaemon, a ronin, who works as sword-tester for the shogun and also has to execute criminals. It takes place in the Edo period of feudal Japan and is above all, a very interesting view at the life of common people in that time in Japan. Since one of the main duties of Asaemon, and the one the series of ten volumes mostly concentrates on, is the beheading of criminals, it’s also a very contemplative series about death and the many reasons why people do things that earns them their fate (and whether fate exist and is avoidable or not). Despite it’s long run, there’s no big story arc, it’s a series of shorter and longer vignettes that mostly tell the last tales of those that get chopped down. At times it can be a little repetitive, but overall it makes you come back again.
Yamada Asaemon, despite his occupation, isn’t a bloodthirsty man. While he’s completely devoted to fulfilling his job, there are hints throughout the series that imply that he hopes that in the future, society will abolish the death penalty (not much luck there). Since most common people also avoid any social contact with him, out of fear, he mostly lives in isolation, apart from those people he gets into contact while doing his job. This may sound like a series full of tragedy, and while there are many moments that are indeed tragic, it never feels too downbeat. Life goes on. If the series is about anything at all, it’s about those things that make life worthy living. Moments of love, of friendship, of closely connecting to other people and being alive at all.
Rating: 4/5
Children of Earth (1986)
by Yukinobu Hoshino
3rd 2001 Nights volume
The third and last volume of 2001 Nights reminds us that just because something is doable doesn’t mean it gets done. Today we have the level of technology to reach Mars or build a station on the Moon, but no answer for why we should do it. Similarly here the age of space exploration comes to an end, with colonies failing one after another, often because of human arrogance to think that other worlds are just like Earth, only to discover this deadly mistake too late. Humanity has the technology to go out into the galaxy, to explore and colonize, but the human spirit has taken one blow too much, and people are tired of space, not ready to sacrifice more of their own.
CoE is far more pessimistic that the first two volumes of 2001 Nights (even if this outcome was foreshadowed in the second one), the grand experiment of space exploration seems to have largely failed. Not completely, since the spaceborn generation leaves human space on a mission of exploration that is unprecedented, and there are still the children of the human race seeding project.
In the end 2001 Nights doesn’t let the reader off with an easy lesson, like space exploration is useless, or space exploration is he one thing we all need to strive for. It’s a sometimes seemingly emotionless look at all the failure modes of it, that never forgets the lives of those who get crushed in all these ambitious plans. And yet it’s also full of this sense of wonder emotion that some of the best SF can evoke. The ending is ambiguous, a lesson that human nature hasn’t changed much, and yet there is hope.
Rating: 5/5
