My first horror manga. I recently read the classic Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and I did not enjoy it because I listened to it on audio and it was just bad. This version, I really enjoyed. I like how Junji Ito did change up the story a little and had Victor actually complete the monster's companion.
The art style was really creepy, but it definitely brought the story of frankenstein to life for me and I highly recommend.
This book also has short stories in it as well, so it is not just Frankenstein. The first short is called Neck Specter. So going with the theme, I am pretty sure the rest of the short stories will all have some form of body horror. This story had to do with necks. We follow a boy named Oshikiri who is digging a massive hole in his back yard to bury his best friend Nakajima, he just murdered. He did it because his best friend got a growth spurt and became super tall and was getting so much attention at school.
He has to keep digging because he can't cover his friends head and then he starts seeing his friends neck start to extend. Oshikiri gets scared and the following day at school, Nakajima is reported missing and Oshikiri is seen as suspicious because he is not showing any emotion. He gets confronted and he starts to see everyone else's necks start to grow. He confesses to the murder and the police find something really odd.
The next short story is called Bog of Living Spirits. We follow the character Oshikiri once again. He is on a beautification committee at his school and he gives the idea that the big behind the school needs to be cleaned. No one wants to clean it because it is supposedly haunted.
When the committee goes to clean it, they are followed by a group of girls who are obsessed with the boy named Kajima. Kajima and Oshikiri go to the top of the bog to clean it and Kajima ends up falling in and not resurfacing. They have divers search the big, but his body is never recovered. We then learn that maybe his death is not a death. The girls are so obsessed that they may be causing other people's deaths.
The next story is called Pen Pal. Oshikiri is feeling lonely in the big delapitated mansion that he is living in. One day he comes across a girl who is also lonely and she paints every day. Her name is Satomi and Oshikiri has a self portrait done. Satomi tells him about three pen pals who are jealous of her new friendship and they are being mean and then say threatening things.
Come to find out that the letters are not from pen pals. Satomi is writing letters to herself and Oshikiri calls her out on it. She then loses it and then the story ends with Oshikiri getting a letter in his own handwriting.
Intruder really fucked with my head. Oshikiri is at school, and he becomes friends with three other students who are into the paranormal and alternate dimensions. They starts talking about occurences and Oshikiri announces that he has been hearing footsteps at night. They go investigate and they see something that is mind blowing and also confirms their suspicions on alternate dimensions and doorways.
It kind of links back to the first story but not linked to the first. This one was much shorter and it ended adruptly, like come up with your own ending.
The strange tale of Oshikiri dives deeper into the alternate dimension plot that was introduced in the previous story. Oshikiri sees a fellow classmate in his house one night and then vanish unexpectedly. The next day she is at school like nothing happened. They start talking and she basically invites herself to his house and he is trying to get her to stay away.
They start seeing things for the alternate dimensions and Oshikiri ends up getting rid of the bad Oshikiri or does he. In the next story The Strange Tale of Oshikiri: The Walls, where there is a mysterious body in the wall of the mansion. The last few of these stories are so short, so I won't be reviewing each one but all I have to say is that they don't connect with the Oshikiri stories. One is about a torture chair at a dentist office and the last two are about a horror manga artist and his maltese dog who eventually dies and plays hide and seek in the ground.
