5/11/2023 0 Comments Lovesickness junji ito manga![]() ![]() “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. ![]()
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