Halloween is right around the corner and there is no better way to celebrate than with a Japanese horror story or two. In fact, make that five Japanese horror stories of the Junji Ito variety.
As Japan’s most celebrated horror mangaka, Junji Ito has earned his place in sun with major hits like Tomie, Uzumaki and Lovesickness. While all three of those stories are highly terrifying in their own right, Ito's major hits aren’t his only best works. With an equally rich library of short stories, Ito has dipped his toe into every horror pool imaginable. From haunting ghost stories to slashers to adaptations of horror classics, here are five of Ito's best works to check out this Halloween!
Gentle Goodbye
Featured in the Junji Ito Collection volume Fragments of Horror, "Gentle Goodbye" is not so much a scary ghost story as much as it is a sad and haunting one. The story follows a newly married couple, Riko and Makoto, as they begin their new lives together. Having joined the Tokura family, Riko quickly finds her husband's family members are not warmly receptive to her and she doesn't understand why.
As the story progresses, Riko learns her husband's family is able to create afterimages of deceased family members as a way of easing their grief. Since Riko fears her father's death, she asks her husband's family to create an afterimage of her father after he passes. Her request is denied, but that turns out to be the least of her worries. When Riko finds out her husband has been having an affair with a woman from his office, she starts learning the truth about her own fate.
Tomio • Red Turtleneck
Another story featured in Fragments of Horror is "Tomio • Red Turtleneck," which is also one of the more terrifying stories. Somewhat inspired Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream," the story follows a young man named Tomio who becomes entranced by a mysterious fortune teller he and his girlfriend Madoka met. Deciding to dump Madoka for the fortune teller, things immediately go awry when the fortune teller decides to behead Tomio after having sex with him.
It turns out the fortune teller was never interested in Tomio and was only looking to add his head to her growing head collection. After showing Tomio the severed heads of all of her previous male victims, he makes a run for his life, but not before the fortune teller casts a spell on him to begin the process of decapitation. Forced to hold on to his head with both hands to keep it from falling off, Tomio goes back to Madoka, hoping she'll take him back in time to save him from certain death.
The Mystery of the Haunted House
As one of the few Souichi Tsujii stories to make it into the US, "The Mystery of the Haunted House" appears in the Junji Ito Collection volume Smashed and is perhaps the most horrifying story of the Souichi series. As a huge departure from the humorous pranks of the 11-year-old Souichi, the story depicts the character as the sadistic 27-year-old owner of a haunted house. As every guest who enters the haunted house soon realizes, however, the place is less of a fun diversion and more of a true house of horrors.
There are two versions of the story, told from the perspectives of two different characters: a young boy named Kouichi (who shares a name with Souichi's older brother) and Michina Hirose, who is Souichi's cousin. In the first version with Kouichi, he decides to investigate rumors about the haunted house with his friend Satoshi. Souichi gives the two boys free entry, only for them to discover that Souichi has a son who eats the guests that come through. Kouichi makes it out alive, but Satoshi isn't so lucky.
In the second version with Michina, she is looking for the missing Tsujii family, as she was close to them as a child. Her investigation brings her to the Tohoku region of Japan where she finds Souichi's older brother in severely declined health. When she finds the rest of the Tsujii family inside Souichi's haunted house, she's horrified to learn that Souichi had enslaved his own family as sideshow attractions and has abused them half to death. Michina is only spared with the timely arrival of Souichi's wife, Fuchi, who is another recurring Junji Ito monster.
Mirror Valley
While Smashed covers a wide range of horror stories, it wouldn't be complete without a ghost romance included in its collection. The short story "Mirror Valley" is something of a Romeo & Juliet meets Wuthering Heights kind of ghost romance. The story follows two star-crossed lovers, Hideo and Toyomi, from rival villages that exist on opposite sides of a river. They are both descendants of the same blood-related clan that split into two groups following a major fallout centuries ago. The two groups formed the two villages and prohibited residents from crossing over to the other side.
On the day that Hideo and Toyomi meet in secret, they discuss eloping when they are caught together by Toyomi's brother. Prohibited from seeing each other by their respective families, Hideo and Toyomi decide to commit a lovers' suicide by drowning in the river that separates their respective villages. They are then reunited as ghosts who not only haunt the river they drowned in but also make love in front of both villages every night, effectively driving villagers on both sides insane. After some time, both villages become cursed, which seals the fates of all its residents.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
Despite Junji Ito being a horror master in his own right with no shortage of stories to tell, he is himself a horror fan. It was only a matter of time before he'd do his own take of a much-beloved horror classic, in this case, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Though not 100% accurate to Shelley's original novel, Ito still follows the same core storyline of a man who decided to play God and suffered the consequences of that decision in catastrophic ways.
Ito's manga adaptation still succinctly captures the novel's gothic imagery, as well as the themes of obsession and ambition, humanity and monstrosity, as well as family and isolation present throughout Shelley's novel. Both Victor Frankenstein and the creature he made are still presented as the paradoxical characters they are in the book. That is to say, Victor is still the human being with monstrous motivations and the creature is still the monstrous creation with human motivations. The combination of Shelley's prose with Ito's art makes the manga adaptation a worthwhile read for the Halloween season.
