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Extra Credit 029 - Junji Ito (Patreon)

Published:
2024-11-28 14:59:09
Imported:
2024-11
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Content

We're taking a horrific peek into the horror manga of writer/artist Junji Ito!

WARNING: WE LOVE IT!

Some YouTube resources:

How a dental technician became the master of modern horror

Uzumaki (2000 film)

Files

Comments

Background Noise Comic

Thanks guys for putting this out today, I’ve got a long day of cleaning & sous-chef-ing, then a lot of humons coming over that I have to fake humon interactions with. This ep will help me get thru. Happy Thanksgiving! -John Hazard

Gideon Falcon

Long, LONG time listener (like, since you were still doing actual Lovecraft long), first time commenting. I was really excited to hear this EC, as Ito does some fantastic work. It's also very funny to see the juxtaposition between Ito and Hayao Miyazaki, Mr. Ghibli himself; one made art filled with whimsy and enchantment, but apparently was actually extremely dour in person; while the other makes grotesque, horrifying stories, but is a cheerful, quirky goofball in real life.

Gideon Falcon

I was also surprised, though it makes sense in hindsight, that you didn't talk about Ito's use of the page turn, something unique to the comic medium. Each of his most iconic and horrific reveals are immediately preceded on the previous page with the characters displaying horrified reactions, so you KNOW, whatever you see next, is going to be awful and terrifying. But you are the one who has to turn the page. It adds that little tug of immersion to the dread, makes the reader almost complicit in what's happening.

Avlin Starfall

I have read a few of Junji Ito's stories but for me The Enigma of Amigara Fault is the the most terrifying. When I first read it I could not sleep that night. I was just so awful to think about and it just stuck in my head as any good horror story does.

Eldritch Golem (JPM)

Nicholas Driscoll is a friend of mine! He doesn't listen to the show so I'll have to tell him he got namedropped during this episode. Really good rundown of Ito and his major works. I thought Chad made several astute observations here beginning with his comment that Ito's work, despite being classed as horror, often has a feeling closer to that of "magical realism." I think this is true about a lot of weird fiction but especially that coming from outside the West. It's worth noting that Lovecraft himself even recognized this in Supernatural Horror in Literature writing: "In the Orient, the weird tale tended to assume a gorgeous colouring and sprightliness which almost transmuted it into sheer phantasy." Lovecraft didn't have that much exposure to eastern weird fiction but he had read Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan which he felt "crystallises with matchless skill and delicacy the eerie lore and whispered legends of that richly colourful nation [i.e. Japan]." Following this was Chad's comment about the characters in Ito's manga having a more "permissive" attitude towards the supernatural. I think this gets at one of the fundamental dichotomies of Western vs Eastern horror or at least American vs Japanese horror. In most American horror fiction the supernatural is treated as something that should not exist and the drama comes from its intrusion into an otherwise presumably secular world. However Japanese horror treats the supernatural as a given. Japanese ghosts and yokai are more like animals. They exist and are around and usually aren't a problem unless we do something to upset them like destroy a forest or a shrine where they might live. On this later note, both Japanese horror author Asamatsu Ken and essayist Harada Minoru have opined that the Japanese may actually be better at writing Cthulhu Mythos fiction than many westerners because they can more readily accept the idea of entities like Cthulhu and the Great Old Ones existing because of this "permissive" attitude towards the supernatural (See the book The Dreaming God, Kurodahan Press, 2007) for both of those observations). Having read my share of Japanese Mythos fiction and seen Shiraishi Kōji's Noroi: The Curse (2005) - quite possibly the greatest cosmic horror film ever made - I'm inclined to think Asmatsu and Harada may be on to something.

Richard Horsman

Ito’s success makes me so happy. Guy is still so human and weird even in the face of worldwide fame. Always love it when getting big lets good people be more themselves. It’s rare and it’s beautiful.

Jason Thompson

Great episode!! Umezu is insanely good, in a bit of an art naive way. He just died (RIP) so falls in your wheelhouse. “My Name is Shingo” and “Drifting Classroom” are great… but if you want to see some deeply disturbing images, Google his final works “Left Hand of God, Right Hand of the Devil” and “Fourteen.” He just got weirder and weirder (and more graphically violent & nasty) as he went on.

Ash Royal

I have a 15 year old niece that has gotten really into Anime and Manga. I know very little about the medium. Would you say Uzimaki is acceptable for her? This could really being saving me this Christmas. I'm not so much worried about horror as sexual content, especially sexual violence. A huge thanks to anyone that can help me out and also to Chad and Chris for another excellent show. P.s. I was surprised nobody commented a while back the when Ray Bradbury's death came up again, Chris described it as "an accident" not "a coincidence". As thr kids say, sounds a bit sus.

Jason Thompson

About the super detailed backgrounds: Chris, don’t beat yourself up about it! Most professional manga artists going back to Osamu Tezuka have used assistants to fill in all that crazy background detail. The especially lazy big time artists might end up basically just doing storyboards and faces and letting their staff fill everything in Jim Davis style. (Though artists in smaller magazines might not be able to afford this, so they don’t have as much detail, and/or just don’t have as much of a social life.) I’m sure Ito really is a workaholic who was spending 12-hour days on these pages, but he was doing a chapter of Uzumaki every two weeks after all, so he almost certainly had an assistant or two! ;)

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

I need to read some Ito -- students in my Monster Lit class keep recommending him to me. I think my favorite fact about him that I've learned by internet osmosis, which I present to students when talking about interpreting the cultural meanings of monsters, is that supposedly in an interview he said his main motivation for featuring a shark with legs amounted to "it would really suck if a shark had legs."

Jim Cannon

You know what's fun? Listening to you guys be super-excited about something. Chad's enthusiasm was infectious! Made me want to revisit Uzumaki all over again. Even with all the creepy Patricia Highsmith content.

MonsterTalk

Not only do people not re-sell their Ito books, but if you loan them to your daughter there's a good chance you'll never get them back. Says a guy I know. I'd really like to get my books back... I bet they're good. Now I really wanna know. :(

Pearce Duncan

I liked Junji Ito's Cat Diary, which he drew in the style of his horror comics but is mostly humorous true stories about the two cats his wife adopted.

Kip Barnes

I was really excited to listen to this episode. I just recently learned about Junji Ito through the HBO series. I picked up the Manga and really really enjoyed it, but I guess when I say I enjoyed it I’m saying I sort of enjoyed it like one might enjoy breaking all their bones and stuffing themselves into a spiral shaped box. I loved it but it disturbed me. I still see these images throughout the day in my minds eye. I’ve read a lot of criticism regarding the HBO adaptation and while I can kinda see what people are saying about the last 2 episodes rushing a little, I think it’s a pretty faithful adaption. The sound design really added to the creep factor for me and I found myself recalling music cues as I went through the pages of the manga. The manga definitely allows the reader to linger on the pages longer which makes some of these images more unsettling. The characters in these stories being more permissive of the horror going on around them added to my own horror I think. You want these characters to escape, but they just seem to not care. Thinking you saw or heard a ghost is far different than watching a classmate turn into a snail. That would be the “nope” moment for me, but then again I think I would have said “nope” long before that. Anyway, this author’s work is very captivating, I’m glad you guys decided to talk about. I have so much fun listening to your show and hearing how you guys interpret these works. I’ve got GYO on order (really hard for me to find online for some reason) and a bunch of his other books coming soon. Excited to dive in. I’d definitely be interested to hear more focused coverage on one of these stories and/or other horror manga authors. Thanks guys!

Incaptivity

Oh man been hoping for this one ever since you guys quickly mentioned him in the Human Chair episode, which I’m surprised you guys didn’t mention in this. Since I’m a little younger my discovery of his work started with everyone spreading the Amigara Fault story like a meme. I don’t know if Ito himself has ever talked about this but his work definitely spread in the west from strong word of mouth on the Internet over many years rather than any kind of actual marketing. Nowadays you’ll find a bunch of his stuff on shirts at the Hot Topic in your local mall and a huge manga section at bookstores but for me it really was just poorly translated rips of his work for a long time.

Steve

The Enigma of Amigara Fault is the only one of his I've read. But totally unrelatedly, I've been using spirals in my long running Trail of Cthulhu game as a signifier for certain kinds of Mythos presences. His brand of weirdness seems to me related to Edogawa Ranpo (see in Ep. 334 - The Chair), which of course inspired one of Ito's stories.

It's a Ghost.

This past week I finished reading Gou Tanabe’s two-volume manga adaptation of Lovecraft’s "At The Mountains of Madness" and found it to be a great companion to the original story. Lovecraft's language makes the original so great, and I loved the visuals of the manga. And next up it sounds like I definitely need to check out some Junji Ito!

Richard Upton Sinclair Lewis Pickman

Unrelated to the Extra Credit topic this month, but I wonder if you’ve considered House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. A fellow finds a manuscript in an eccentric’s abandoned house which discusses a film which seemingly does not exist, about a house with disconcerting properties, and which contains a non-descript menacing entity. Just a thought.