Junji Ito's Remina is the latest English-language release from the famed master of horror manga. The story follows the events surrounding the arrival of a mysterious planet that suddenly appears from a wormhole, lightyears away from Earth. The scientist who discovered the planet, Dr. Oguro, decides to name the celestial body after his beloved daughter, the beautiful, shy Remina, who becomes a celebrity in her own right as Remina-mania overtakes the populace.
However, it soon becomes clear that Remina is no ordinary planet, defying the laws of physics as it moves through space, causing planets and stars to disappear as it goes. Not only that, but Remina begins to make for Earth, spelling doom for everything on it, but especially Remina Oguro.
Like many of Ito's most famous works, Remina is a story that wields its terror like a weapon. Things escalate quickly and never slow down or let up, making you fear the next swing of the blade, unsure how much it'll hurt or, in this case, horrify. Things twist and turn so fast and so efficiently, it's easy to miss how unsettled you actually feel until you put the book down for a moment. But it's easy to see why things move the way they do: readers get it from both sides in Remina, dealing with both Oguro's helpless struggle for her life against zeitgeist gone mad and humanity's helpless struggle against an unstoppable planet come to destroy us all.
Remina Oguro is a likable protagonist and easy to feel for, but it's the broader issue that's the most compelling. Throughout the story, humans devise a number of ways to stop the planet or outsmart their circumstances — killing Oguro, who they believe to have drawn Remina to Earth, is one of these — but nothing works. The planet isn't just full of unknowns, it's unknowable, giving up nothing as humanity pokes and prods and theorizes about its origins and purpose. Death is certain and, as much as humanity rails against it, it's coming — and there's simply nothing that can be done. Readers learn to fear Remina as humanity in the story grows more panicked about it, and that fear lingers even after the story's through.
And it's that fear that makes Remina the type of story we don't really need right now, although its tale of paranoid conspiracy and desperation is perfectly suited to the moment. The timing isn't Ito's fault — the story was written and released years ago in Japan — but at the heart of Remina is the best (worst?) kind of cosmic-horror. The kind that makes you feel small and insignificant, even as it shows the kind of power — albeit destructive power — collective, human action can have. Of course, that power is nothing in the face of something like Remina, which is what makes the feeling so terrifying, whether you buy into our "smallness" or not.
However, the fact that Ito knows exactly how to weaponize that fear of insignificance and knows exactly how to scale it up into the most oppressive, dark feeling in a story chock-full of them, is why Remina is such a classic work of horror. Outdone only by the likes of Ito's own Uzumaki, Remina pounces on the one thing we can't escape, the Earth, and still manages to make a cosmic doomsday scenario completely human, in all the best and worst ways. With beautiful artwork and a terrifying story that sticks to you no matter how much you want to let it go, Remina will have even the most desensitized horror fans looking up to the sky, praying nothing looks back.
