“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. You're uneasy from page one all the way through to the end of this 400+ page collection.Junji Itō’s best known manga is probably Uzumaki - a series of connected stories about a town cursed by an obsession with spirals. I'd compare it to a roller coaster, but there's rarely a down moment. It starts out strong and only gets more frightening as it goes on. Ito is in complete control of the scares in Lovesickness. Ito plunges the knife in with a shocking moment and then continues to twist it with each chapter, sending the story into unparalleled levels of terror.

Lovesickness is another solid entry in the creator's library. Is Ryusuke connected to these deaths? Can he stop them?Īt this point, I'm experienced enough in manga to know that anything with Junji Ito's name on it is a must buy. Now corner fortunes are popular in this town once more and people are killing themselves in a similar fashion. Years ago, when he was just a little kid, he gave a woman a bad fortune during a night of anger. In Ryusuke's case, it's even tougher with the trauma he left behind there.

Lovesickness by junji ito