Horror Tales from the Far East

Though Halloween may be a Western holiday, if you want to read horror comics this week, you'd do better turning to Japan. The wealth of material being imported far outpaces the amount and quality produced domestically in the horror genre. Three outstanding recent releases range in style from a twist on the teenagers-in-peril subgenre (Junji Ito's Museum of Terror) to extreme gross-out humor (Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl) to a disturbing medical thriller by Japan's most revered comix creator (Osamu Tezuka's Ode to Kirihito).

Of the various publishers of translated manga, Dark Horse comics has distinguished itself in publishing superior horror titles, releasing five different multi-volume horror titles this year alone. Among them were two that should not be missed: Junji Ito's Museum of Terror and Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl. Arguably Japan's premier horror manga-ka, Ito has a fevered imagination that has given us Uzumaki, about a town beset by spirals, and Gyo, about dead fish that sprout legs and wreak havoc upon the land. Museum of Terror (two volumes so far, $14 each) collects the so-called Tomie tales, all featuring the beguiling teenage Tomie, a supernatural beauty with a nasty attitude who inspires complex feelings in the men who fall under her spell. "I dream of having her all to myself," says one would-be paramour, "Thing is, if she were mine … I think I might kill her. … I don't know if even ripping her apart would be good enough. That's the way she makes me feel."

Tomi rises again, even without her head. (Read right to left)

But it's not Tomie you worry about. She gets slaughtered scores of ways, including being mashed into pulp and turned into sake, but always regenerates to induce her slaves into perverse acts of murder and torture. Instead, pity the poor wretches whose eyes turn dark and cheeks become sallow as their will power seeps away. Rendered with a high degree of realism, Ito's drawings and storytelling more closely resemble Western comics than other Japanese imports. This makes them easier to read, in spite of being printed right to left like the other Dark Horse manga books. Full of satisfyingly graphic violence and ectoplasmic f/x, Ito delivers not just the required amount of gore but smartly expands on such commonplace terrors as the fear of losing oneself in a relationship. Though the mostly unconnected stories lack the satisfying arc of a novel, acquiring at least one of the two volumes of Museum of Terror will fulfill any horror fan's bloodlust.

Where Junji Ito represents the classic horror style, Toru Yamazaki's Octopus Girl takes the genre to its comical extremes. Conflating the ultra-cutesy style of girl's shojo manga with outrageously repulsive gross-out humor, the three volumes so far ($13 each) may be the funniest books of the year, as well as the most disgusting. The first story of the first volume starts like a typical shojo book might, with a bunch of school girls tormenting their cute classmate Takako. But in this version, they jump on top her and make her lunch vegetables squirt out her nose. She decides "I'll open my heart and reach out to them! Then they'll stop bullying me!" Instead they throw her in the pool and force her to eat octopus (the Japanese word for octopus, tako, sounds like Takako). Overnight she sprouts octopus legs and wreaks hideous revenge by stuffing her tentacles into her rival's mouths and popping their eyeballs out from the inside in wildly grotesque panels.

You don't wanna know what's in Octopus Girl's mouth

By the third volume Yamazaki has gone deliriously out of control. One of the short stories, a Red Shoes parody about a pair of ballet slippers that won't let Takako stop dancing, ends with her excreting on herself to change the color of the shoes and release her from the curse. Like an outrageous drag queen that ramps up the "feminine" signifiers to extreme levels, Yamazaki tweaks the tropes of girl's manga up to preposterous proportions. Characters don't just cry, for examples, rivers of tears flood out of their faces. In another story, Octopus Girl competes in a beauty pageant. Everything is perfectly cute and delightful until centipedes pour out of a rival's outfit. "Dear God!" marvels Octopus Girl, with a look of deep concern, followed quickly by, "I put those centipedes in her outfit. That's the first bitch down!" Labeled for "mature" readers, but without an ounce of maturity, Toru Yamazaki's pukingly funny Octopus Girl reads like the notebook of a secretly talented schoolgirl ostracized as "scary."

For those interested in a classier package and more novelistic read, Vertical, Inc., publisher of the Buddha series by revered manga author Osamu Tezuka (1928-1989), has just released his single volume Ode to Kirihito (825 pages; $25). Best known for his stories on themes of the power of love and karmic justice, here Tezuka has created a sophisticated medical horror story, with so much perversity that it may permanently change the master's American reputation as the Japanese Walt Disney. Though it retains Tezuka's core interest in the karmic consequences of immoral behavior, in this particular book he seems to take a strange pleasure in depicting the worst of human nature. How else do explain scenes like a dog-faced former nun being raped by her physician?

The book begins as Kirihito (which means "Christ" in Japanese), a brilliant doctor, visits a remote village to investigate the cause of monmow disease, a disorder that slowly twists its victim's features into that of a dog, eventually killing them. But when Kirihito himself contracts the disease, his world is turned upside down. Erased from the rolls of his hospital by an ambitious boss who sees Kirihito's work as a threat, Kirihito finds himself a total outcast and put on display in a private freak show for a group of decadent patrons. As Kirihito struggles for his freedom, the stories of his boss and a former colleague continue in parallel.

Dr. Urabe has a melt down in 'Ode to Kirihito'

Tezuka creates a devestating portrait of corrupting ambition as Kirihito's boss rises to power by exploiting victims of monmow disease. But the storyline that follows Kirihito's former colleague, Dr. Urabe, may be the most disturbing to Western audiences. While searching for the true cause of monmow disease Urabe struggles with his own predilections as a sexual predator. Ode to Kirihito has plenty of stunningly sadistic moments — including a giant snake consuming a baby for the pleasure of an audience — but the gratuitous scenes of rape, often followed by the victim's falling in love with the victimizer, will change most reader's perception of Tezuka's work. Readers should realize, however, that the depiction of rape holds a different place in Japanese pop culture than it does here, and Tezuka's work needs to be contextualized in that culture. What raises eyebrows here exists as a fairly normalized depiction over there. The reasons for this go beyond my meager expertise but undoubtedly have something to do with use of art in a society that represses outward sexuality and expression.

As always, Tezuka provides a master class in graphical storytelling. Mercifully printed in left to right format, Ode to Kirihito has many stunning sequences, including one where Dr. Urabe begins going mad. His body disappears and a wedge cleaves his head in two in a psychedelic sequence that wouldn't be out of place in a drug film of the same era. (Kirihito was originally serialized in 1970.) The design of Tezuka's pages endlessly varies in shape and flow to reflect the action of a sequence or a character's state of mind. He never shies away from crazy experimentation, as when one panel uses a distorted photograph in a character's word balloon to emphasize the stress of the moment.

The most complex book we have yet seen from Osamu Tezuka, Ode to Kirihito uses the core elements of any good horror story, fear, madness, disease and sadism, to explore morals and the broad consequences of an individual's actions. So whether you like your scary stories to be sophisticated like Kirihito, traditional like Museum of Terror, or rude like Octopus Girl, you won't lack for material this Halloween.