On the night before he left town, six-year-old Ryusuke threw a tantrum and went running through the mist. 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. Ryusuke is returning to a nameless, mist-ridden Japanese town after eight years away. The novella’s main character is middle-school student Ryusuke, one of Itō’s typically secretive, passive protagonists. It is one of Itō’s masterpieces, and a brilliant example of how his best work slides into the abyss by going nowhere with great deliberation. The real reason to buy this collection is the 240-page title novella. These slight stories are all just make-weight, however. (VIZ unfortunately does not provide publication histories for these stories, but original printings were mostly in the late 1990s.) Or maybe Itō doing the Addams Family just wasn’t that great an idea to begin with. “The Strange Hikizuri Siblings” is a two-story set which still doesn’t really have enough time to develop its tale of an unpleasant gothy murderous group of cohabitating siblings. “The Mansion of Phantom Pain” and “The Rib Woman” barely establish their supernatural conceits before they’re over the spiral from normality to despair happens so fast you barely have time to feel vertiginous. It’s not a surprise, then, that several of the briefer tales in VIZ’s new collection Lovesickness come across as hurried or unfinished. As a result, disconnected short stories don’t necessarily showcase Itō’s talents to best effect. It takes some time to roll those dreams around again and again until you build up the requisite nausea and disgust at each reiteration. His bland, blank, sweating characters spin lazily around, devoured in the whorls of their own cancerous dreams. In Uzumaki, or in Itō’s Tomie stories, a ghost, or an obsession, or a lust, or a death, keep returning slightly mutilated or altered. Though he often gestures at more conventional EC Comics narratives with last page shock reveals, his most affecting creations are built on imagistic repetition, in which the horror is not that you’ve hit a dead end, but that you never reach any end at all. The coil or whorl at the slowly revolving center of that book is a good metaphor for Itō’s horror style. Junji Itō’s best known manga is probably Uzumaki - a series of connected stories about a town cursed by an obsession with spirals.

Lovesickness by Junji Ito