October is Spookey Month: "Uzumaki," another Halloween reading recommendation!

Junji Ito, Uzumaki (1998-9)

I don’t know why Junji Ito hasn’t caught on with manga fans in the Americas.  Both Viz Media and Dark Horse Comics have released very nice books collecting Ito’s work, but they don’t seem to have made much of an impact there as far as comics culture goes.  I think he should be mentioned in the same breath as Mike Mignola, but he seems largely a cultish figure, and somewhat elusive.  Dark Horse has two Museum of Terror volumes (the third seems to be out of print) and Viz offers Uzumaki, of course.  Gyo is worth a read, although I didn't particularly care for it.  It's about dead fish and a killer odor, neither of which inspires much interest in me.  But Museum features Ito's most well-known creation-- Tomie, the beautiful, unkillable school girl-- and inspired a hit-and-miss movie series that seems never to to die completely, just like Tomie herself.  Uzumaki also became a film, a severely truncated version with a hugely disappointing ending and played largely for laughs.  A great deal of Ito's more recent short stories and other tales-- many of which are absolutely brilliant-- haven't been made available in English other than through "scanlations."

What is Ito like in his every day life?  Probably just another hard-working mangaka.  A regular kind of guy who puts in long hours at the drawing table.  After all, before he began his comics career and started creating chills and thrills, he was a dental technician.  But in his stories, the man reveals a seriously twisted genius.  His characters inhabit a universe ruled by dream logic, by malicious forces acting either arbitrarily or for capricious reasons beyond our human understanding.  Whatever it is, it's a dark, pitiless place with little hope for escape or redemption.  Ito's work is true horror and the man doesn't really have any peers, because no one working in the genre can touch him.  

While I was an imaginative little kid who often spent sleepless nights after reading even the mildest of DC ghost stories, as an adult I’m pretty hard-boiled when it comes to printed horror.  Uzumaki, Ito’s masterpiece, gave me a serious case of the creeps.  It made my stomach churn.  Even today, years after I initially read Uzumaki, moments from the story recur in my mind, like childhood nightmares recalled time and again in broad daylight, in the most unexpected of places.  Writing this, I suddenly feel it faintly in my nervous system, on my skin, as if it Ito himself tattooed itself there, indelible.  As the old idiom goes, it's as if someone walked on my grave.

Kirie Goshima is a normal high school girl, another of Ito’s fragile, doll-like female protagonists.  She lives in Kurozu-cho ("Black Vinegar Town"), a seaside town like many here in Japan.  Sea for one border, mountains for another.  Kurozu-cho is a little cut off from the rest of Japan thanks to geography, and it has a mysterious past.  Little by little—a whirlwind here, a guy obsessed with swirling his miso soup there—Kirie discovers to her growing horror an ever-pervasive influence by the spiral.  No ghosts, no monsters, just a simple shape curving in on itself.  Kirie‘s boyfriend Shuichi has already noticed things not quite normal and is coming unraveled.  Kind of like a thread from a blanket that curls in your fingers as you try to pluck it.

And with that simple set-up, life for the two luckless teens increasingly spirals out of control.  Ito tells the story in vignettes, from Kirie’s point of view; Shuichi has introduced the girl into a world where literally anything can be perverted by the pernicious influence of the spiral.  After a couple of early chapters, each of which tends to follow a formula of developing a premise, developing it, then delivering a disgusting punchline, you begin to anticipate what the spiral will do next.  The results still shock.

Like diseased mushrooms, events grow inexorably out of each other and transformations and mutations abound.  As the spriral closes in, Kurozu-cho darkens to a place where a girl with a crescent-shaped scar on her forehead becomes a monstrous entity, a boy obsessed with pop-up surprise scares becomes a ruined jack-in-the-box figure and even the joy of birth becomes the stuff of nightmares.  The signal transformation involves a particularly slow-moving classmate of Kirie’s.  His physical and mental changes are off-putting enough by themselves, but just when you think you’ve reached the point where you can somewhat live with the memories (or at least resume your normal diet), they maddeningly recur to other characters until the situation escalates to what is arguably cannibalism—or something for which we’ll have to invent a completely new word for gastronomic crimes against humanity.  Kirie pursues these rapidly proliferating horrors towards their twisted center, where the story takes on Lovecraftian proportions and escape may prove impossible.

These are stories to read in the daytime.  If you can find them, that is.  But be warned—Ito does not flinch from reshaping his characters to suit the spiral’s whims and a lot of the imagery is extremely disturbing.  Not for tender psyches or weak constitutions.  Oh, and don't eat escargot before you read it.

Here's a little something about the Kyoto International Manga Museum

According to a story appearing in the Japan Times Online, the Kyoto International Manga Museum attracts "200,000 to 300,000 visitors a year, including some 30,000 from abroad."  The museum, which opened in 2006, features a "wall of manga," called, appropriately enough, the Wall of Manga.  It's about 200 meters long and features over 50,000 comics dating back to the 1970s.  There's even a computer search kiosk available so you can locate the exact manga you want to read.  Pretty helpful if you know the one you want.  But if you're not intimidated by the sheer size of the Wall, you can approach it and choose a volume at random.  Whatever catches your eye.  Yeah, you can read the manga.  Take it off the shelf, open it up, start reading.

Since the museum's website claims about 10% of its visitors come from overseas-- bearing out the Japan Times story, I suppose-- they even have a number of international manga.  That's comic books to you and me, Russ.  The largest group is made up of Japanese comics in translation:  970 in English, 670 in Korean and a whopping 1330 in Chinese!  Also represented are German, Italian, Spanish and Catalan and "other European languages."  There are around 400 volumes of homegrown North American, European and other Asian comics, too.  I wonder if they have that one Wolverine where he had an eyepatch and used his claws on those dudes...

"Summer School" at the museum just started today, August 1st, and runs through the 26th.  I'm not out to earn my PhD in manga, but I'd love to attend some of the art instruction classes.  They're in Japanese only, naturally.  The museum accepts donations of materials, as well.  If I leave Japan again that's what I'll do with my rapidly growing comic collection-- donate it to the Kyoto International Manga Museum so people from Japan and around the world can enjoy my impeccable taste in sequential literature.

Even though I've lived in Japan off and on since before this museum opened, I have to admit I still haven't made my pilgrimage.  While I've been to Tokyo and scoured Akihabara, Shibuya, Harajuku and Ikebukuro for comics so many times I've lost count, I don't go to Kyoto very often.  Twice.  And both times I encountered cold weather and nasty rain.  Kyoto and I just haven't been able to see eye-to-eye on what constitutes a pleasant visit.  One of my good friends went to the museum, though, and he's not even a comic book reader.  Before his visit, he'd read Ghost World, and that's about it.  The museum deeply impressed him.  Then he went down the street to a local bookstore and bought some English-translated manga for himself.  Knowing my love for comics he texted me while he was doing it like some kind of pervert performing some weird and gross act we won't even begin to try to imagine and having to share it to increase his sick, disgusting pleasure, and like a similarly perverted individual I jumped right in to join him and demanded he buy the first two volumes of Ai Yazawa's Nana for me.

And that's how I became addicted.  Addicted enough I need to hit Kyoto and visit this place.  Unfortunately, I can't do it during my summer break.  I'm already committed to yet another Tokyo junket, but that's mostly for business.  My passport needs renewing!  But since I recently became engaged and my fiancee is returning to Japan in October so we can start our life together-- I know, it's sickeningly sweet-- there's more than likely a Kyoto trip for two in our near future.  Now she could give a rip about manga but she cares about me, so we'll stand in front of that Wall of Manga and maybe she'll share with me the ones she read when she was a kid.