Lovesickness by Junji Ito Review

 

Summary (No Spoilers):

Lovesickness by Junji Ito is a collection of short horror manga stories with the main story focusing on a string of unusual suicides from teenage girls who received crossroads fortunes.

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In-Depth Review (Spoilers Ahead!):

This book is divided into three sections, the five stories for Lovesickness, the two stories The Strange Hikizuru Siblings, and three unconnected short stories.

Lovesickness

These five stories make up the bulk of the collection, and they are by far the strongest reason to own a copy of the manga.

Lovesickness follows a teenage boy named Ryusuke who arrives back at his home town, forced to remember a fatal error he made as a child when he was rude to a desperate, mentally unwell woman who stood at a crossroads asking him for a love fortune as she was pregnant with a married man's son; his rude response was the final catalyst for the young woman, who used a box cutter to slit her throat and kill herself. This was obviously not Ryusuke's fault as he was only a child, and he shouldn't have been put into that situation to begin with.

This memory was brought back to him as teenage girls were still doing crossroads fortunes, something originally innocent which becomes twisted by the appearance of a pretty boy who always answers the fortunes in a negative way, leading to unusual behaviors from the teenage girls who receive his answer. Eventually these girls follow the same method of suicide as the woman Ryusuke had unintentionally driven to suicide all those years ago.

Ryusuke is followed by misfortune with these suicides, as one of the teenage girls (Suzune) was a friend of his crush (Midori), and the friend sought out a way to help the two reconnect during a disagreement (mainly from Ryusuke's guilt, as Midori's aunt was the woman who had committed suicide all that time ago). However, Suzune received a fortune from the pretty boy at the crossroads, and she lost all sense of her original self with a need for Ryusuke's love. She became sicker with love, and her appearance became gaunt and hollow, visualized in an unsettling and sad way; this escalated until Ryusuke rejected her, and in response to the rejection, Suzune took her own life.

Ryusuke and Midori, shaken by the suicide of someone close to them on top of the many other cases of teenage girls committing suicide popping up in town, start to work together to try to reverse the crossroads fortunes by providing their own more positive fortunes, but eventually Midori is cornered by the pretty boy and given a crossroads fortune of her own, making her love for Ryusuke turn to hate. This makes solving the mystery all the more difficult for the both of them, as Midori does terrible things like try to feed him a rat she put in a nicely wrapped box. It's really creepy and sad, knowing she doesn't want to do any of those things but she's driven to it by a supernatural force outside of her. It only gets worse until Midori takes her own life so she can stop hating Ryusuke.

It seems the pretty boy is either the unborn son of the woman who committed suicide (less likely, as Midori's explanation would conflict with her death) or the lost eldest son of the man who committed the affair with the woman who killed herself all those years ago (more likely, as it's an unsolved mystery in the story and comes up fairly abruptly); it's not clear how this happened or why, but the mystery of it does add to the overall confusing and unsettling situation since there's no clear reason these teenage girls all suffered and died (typical of Junji Ito's works, as there are often more questions than answers).

After Midori's death, Ryusuke becomes a ghost of the crossroads to balance out the negative energy of the boy in black, Ryusuke's ghostly form moving forward dressed all in white while providing positive crossroads fortunes in the foggy town. Eventually this returns a tentative peace to the town once more.

The setting really made this story all the more interesting, and many details of it reminded me of one of my favorite games Persona 4. The eerie deaths of the teenage girls really added to the atmosphere of the story, along with the mystery and the supernatural elements being well-done, so I'll give this story a rating of 10/10.

The Strange Hikizuru Siblings

These two stories don't seem to hold up that well in a reread, and they weren't that amazing in an initial read either.

The Strange Hikizuru Siblings involves two stories following the dysfunctional members of the twisted Hikizuru family (Kazuya, Kinako, Shigoro, Narumi, Hitoshi, Misako). 

The first story (Narumi's Boyfriend) starts with Narumi repeatedly attempting to end her life, but she's thwarted by her classmate Kotani, who opens his door for her to live with him. Their living situation becomes even more undesirable as Narumi continues to threaten to end her life anytime Kotani asks her to leave. 

Eventually Narumi is dragged off back home by her weird family, who have a dynamic that's often more annoying than it is funny. Narumi tires of the dynamic and sets herself on fire to the shock of the siblings.

Kotani is brought to the Hikizuru Mansion and he's demanded to make amends for what he did as the siblings weep. He's forced to roll around in a futon with Narumi's burnt remains and chased around the house when he tries to run. He ends up dead by the end of the whole mess, and the family buries him, only to reveal it was a prank and Narumi was completely fine.

The second story (The Seance) follows the eldest sibling Kazuya as he goes about his life wasting his time and not working like he told his siblings he was doing to support them. He meets a pretty photographer named Sachiyo, learning of her interest in ghostly photography and inviting her to the Hikizuru Mansion.

When Sachiyo arrives, the family shows her around the cemetery, but Shigoro especially takes an interest, leading to conflict between Kazuya and Shigoro later that night at dinner. The other family members are reluctantly dragged into it, especially poor Hitoshi (second youngest) as he's attacked across the face when he tries to comfort Misako (youngest).

Kazuya decides to hold a seance to comfort Misako, but it becomes clear to Kinako it's only to impress Sachiyo. The seance goes awry, as Shigoro gets channeled by his dead father and throws up ectoplasm as he yells at Kazuya and gives rule over the house to Shigoro. But really, neither of these brothers should be leading this family... They're both jerks who want to be treated like kings and don't care about how badly messed up their family dynamic is as long as they get what they want out of it.

It comes to Kazuya's attention when Shigoro tells him to invite Sachiyo to the next seance (this time without her boyfriend) that the sample the boyfriend took from the ectoplasm proves it was only wheat flour. This only further serves to stir up trouble, as Kazuya heads back to confront Shigoro and argue with him.

Hitoshi is dragged into the middle of it, but he seems oddly sick and suddenly some strange white substance comes out of his mouth, taking on the form of the ghost of their dead father, and the rest of the family is chased out of the house, only a confused Hitoshi unaware of what happened. That poor kid needs to get out of there...

These stories were underwhelming, as the best they had going for them was Junji Ito's style in creating some of the more gruesome moments, but the humor fell flat the longer the stories dragged on, though it had a few characters I liked, especially Hitoshi because he reminded me of the boy from Ju-On in terms of the eerie creepiness to his normal behavior in contrast to the family's strange behaviors. For these reasons, I'll give this a 5/10.

The Mansion of Phantom Pain

 This story is stand-alone, and it follows a group of workers trying to relieve the phantom pain of a boy named Yusuke. Yusuke started out feeling pain outside of himself, and it grew worse over time, soon extending to cover the entire estate. Bricks cover the windows to try to contain his pain from spreading further.

The main character Kozeki doubts the pain is real, and another worker agrees with him, calling the boy a liar. But if Yusuke is truly delusional... he's not lying. That's the reality he believes.

However, strangely enough, Kozeki began to feel pain more strongly the longer he was in the house, as all the other workers felt less pain, making them too used to ignoring their injuries.

Yusuke's father is first to die from an infection, and Yusuke's mother desperately asks the workers to stay, even offering her estate if they do. The workers agree.

But the workers started to get sicker, their injuries growing and infection spreading. Kozeki begged them to seek a hospital, but the workers refused. Eventually more workers died from their injuries.

Two workers lose their patience and kill Yusuke and his mother, wanting the estate for themselves, but the door is locked and no one can find the key. Eventually all the workers die from infection, the stench of death consuming the estate.

Only Kozeki lives, feeling the phantom pain as it surrounds him, perhaps finding a new victim.

This story offers an interesting look at chronic pain and illness told through an unsettling supernatural phemenonen, and the gruesome toll it takes on the mental and physical health of all involved was unsettling. For that, I'll give this a 9/10.

The Rib Woman

 This story is standalone, following the story of Yuki, a girl so ashamed of her figure she won't even go swimming. She's jealous of her brother's girlfriend Ruriko and considers getting surgery to remove some of her ribs to have a similar figure.

Yuki happens to run into Ruriko as she's leaving the surgery clinic, not yet decided on surgery. Ruriko seems distressed about strange music she keeps hearing. Yuki can almost hear it, so she brings Ruriko to her brother Keisuke the next night.

Keisuke can't hear the music as well as the girls, so he follows as they lead him to the park, where they meet a mysterious woman who plays an instrument made out of a rib bone. Ruriko freaks out when she sees it, destroying it.

Shortly after, Ruriko disappears. Her body is later found missing all of her ribs.

Yuki decides she wants to go through with the surgery on her ribs, a ridiculous concept after witnessing her brother's girlfriend die so horribly. The doctor tells her strange things: Ruriko was one of his patients, and the other woman was so mentally unstable he agreed to remove all her ribs. Why does this doctor still have a license?!

Yuki begins to hear the same music Ruriko heard, and she tells Keisuke, who does not respond well to a reminder of his girlfriend's death, so Yuki searches alone.

Yuki finds the strange woman, who reveals an instrument made of Yuki's rib bone, and then the woman shows her chest, a gruesome mesh of wires and organs, a horrendous sight. How is she alive...? She should've died from the exposure or even infection. The strange woman explains how Ruriko's ribs were implanted into her body, but it was a failure.

The doctor appears behind Yuki, and the strange woman demands he take her ribs as well to fix her. They both try to attack, but Keisuke runs in to save his sister.

The siblings never see the woman, but they still hear her music. What became of her...?

The story had some parts that were unrealistic and quite silly, but it was a dark, extreme take on the horrors of the beauty industry with the girls who go through with it haunted and pained by that awful music, and the image of the woman with her chest full of wires was fantastically grotesque. For that, I'll give this a 8/10.

Memories of Real Poop

This was the weakest and most unnecessary of the manga stories, an attempt at humor by Junji Ito that fell flat for me. It follows a young boy acquiring fake, plastic poop at a festival. Little more can be said, and this collection would be much stronger without it, so I'll give this a 1/10.

Book Rating: 4/5