Junji Ito Returns to Horror with Two New Titles!

Junji Ito is the only artist to have made me literally jump in fear. Now, I’m definitely tightly-wound enough to leap in fear at every cheap jump scare in a game or movie, but when reading manga? Reading is not supposed to work like that; but Ito’s work is so entrancing, so hypnotic, that turning the page to be confronted with something like this is enough to make me flinch away in fright:

Sadly, Ito’s work has been hard to get hold of, with many translations going out of print or not happening at all. Add to that an eight-year hiatus from the horror manga where he earned his reputation and it has been a fallow time for Ito’s western fans. Happily, the number of his collections available to English speakers has doubled in the last two months with the publication of two new titles, so if you’re not familiar with this purveyor of horrific body horror, strap yourself in because there’s never been a better time to correct that mistake.

Fragments of Horror sees Ito return to the horror comics that gave him his fame. It is a short story collection, written and drawn by Ito in his distinctive, highly-detailed style. Featuring carnivorous futons, symbiotic house fetishists, a cheating boyfriend trying to hold his own severed head in place, and a woman determined to be dissected alive, it is a wonderful return to horror for Ito, full of his unexplained strangeness and grossly-detailed body horror.

Fragments of Horror takes a couple of stories to warm up, but it when it gets going it is glorious. The second half of the collection sees Ito branching out into territory that is less gross-out and more psychological than his previous work, with great effect. “Gentle Goodbye” is a ghost story with little of his usual flair for the disgusting, but is disquieting nonetheless, while “Magami Nanakuse” is a satirical look at the art of creation that culminates in a gloriously horrible panel that I desperately want to show you but can’t because it’s also a spoiler.

The other new manga is Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon and Mu, which chronicles the author’s struggles adapting to cat ownership when his fiancée comes to live with him, bringing along the two titular cats. Sound dull? Yon and Mu is surprisingly heartfelt and bittersweet, while Ito is happy to make himself the butt of most of the jokes as he goes from despising his feline interlocutors to desperately seeking their love and attention. Yon and Mu are cats, of course, so remain for the most part unimpressed by his efforts.Yon and Mu are the stars of the show, lovingly detailed, if perhaps a little too graphically (I’ve not seen so many immaculately-rendered anuses depicted so lovingly since the last time I chanced upon the Deep Web). Ito’s full-and-frank dissection of their habits is shockingly frank in a completely different way to his usual style.

Of course, a lifetime career in horror cannot be so easily set aside and Yon and Mu also features some of Ito’s strangest, most unsettling artwork, made that way by its strange contrast with the everyday. Goro, his in-laws’ cat, is depicted as nothing more than a flitting shadow, an elusive yet chaotic presence. His girlfriend is always drawn without pupils, making her seem like some form of invading spirit. And Ito’s manic attempts to play with the cats contort and twist his face as if he is possessed.

In fact, this contrast between the horrific and the mundane is nothing new–Ito’s work has long explored the creeping dread of something otherworldly slipping into the real world. Sometimes Ito’s manga can feel like extended, unpleasant jokes; everyday life goes terribly wrong with little or no explanation, leading up to the punchline, an image so disgusting and over-the-top in its graphic detail as to disturb the reader. It is these moments that made me jump when first reading Ito, and he still has that power.

Are these two collections the best place to start reading Junji Ito? Well, Yon and Mu feels like a curiosity, Ito’s gift for the gross and the disturbing restrained and restricted by his choice of subject matter. It sits firmly on its own, an aside from his main work, but its surprising tenderness is a treat for Ito fans or simply manga fans.

Fragments of Horror, however, is a great place to start; it contains the distilled essence of what makes him unique as a writer and artist in easy-to-swallow chunks, perfectly preparing the reader for something longer and more gruelling. Ultimately, though, I like my Ito longer, with more time given over for him to really explore the depths of his strange and perverse imagination.

Uzumaki and Gyo are both available in absolutely gorgeous hardback editions from Viz Media; Gyo depicts a plague of walking fish climbing onto land to cause havoc, while Uzumaki (widely considered Ito’s masterpiece) marries a possession narrative with extreme body-horror and Lovecraftian bleakness. Both of these go deeper and sustain the horror far longer than Ito’s shorts. As a starter, however, or if you’re revisiting Ito after his long absence, Fragments of Horror is an outstanding collection.