Venus in the Blind Spot (Junji Ito Book 0)

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Billions Alone… This was my favourite of the "new-to-me" stories in the collection. It one felt so timely, warning against the dangers of social gatherings and rewarding those who choose to self isolate. Billions Alone: Where corpses are being found in rivers and forests throughout Japan sewn together to make one corpse. Utterly frightening imagery and what a great start to this collection. An Unearthly Love- 3 stars Doll obsessions are not my thing and this one follows a woman married to a man who she thinks is cheating on her. It turns out to be a doll which leads to some complications in their marriage as one would expect. I felt bad for the woman, but like I said, not my kind of story. Subsequent chapters are less effective, with the weakest being "How Love Came to Professor Kirida," a story about the obsessive love of women that transcend death to terrorize the men that rebuffed them. Similarly, "Keepsake" also features a man haunted beyond the grave after an eerie child is found born from the corpse of his dead wife. "Master Umezz and Me" is a humorous autobiographical chapter about Junji Ito and his childhood and later work intersecting with his favorite horror manga creator, Kazuo Umezz ( Kazuo Umezu), the creator of The Drifting Classroom and Cat Eyed Boy. The opening chapter "Billions Alone" feels exceptionally relevant given the current times but would function exponentially better as a short series ala Uzumaki than as a single chapter. I feel like this was missing a critical piece but of something. Yet I can’t quite figure out what that might be...

You might not comprehend it right away, but if you think about it, you might be able to figure out what Ito is trying to say. Interesting. After reading this, I'm relieved that I can enjoy my own company and don't require outside entertainment on a regular basis. Junji Ito is, perhaps, a creator who needs no introduction. He is long beloved of many manga fans, recently rising in popularity with a much wider audience, his horror comics touching upon universal fears and fancies. Publisher VIZ Media has committed to bringing more and more of his work to North America, the most recent installment being the short story collection Venus in the Blind Spot . Translation & Adaptation: Jocelyne Allen and Yuji Oniki (“The Enigma of Amigara Fault” and “The Sad Tale of the Principal Post”)

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The collection also included a personal piece where Junji Ito explained how he got into horror manga as a child, which was interesting although not particularly relatable as a North American reader (since I didn't understand a lot of the books, celebrities & tv shows he was talking about). This was another solid collection from the brilliant and talented horror manga author, Junji Ito. Like all his previous work, the artwork was stunning, disturbing and disgusting… often at the same time. As with any short story collections, there were standouts and forgettable ones.

Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, he was inspired from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's comics and thus took an interest in drawing horror comics himself. Nevertheless, upon graduation he trained as a dental technician, and until the early 1990s he juggled his dental career with his increasingly successful hobby — even after being selected as the winner of the prestigious Umezu prize for horror manga. The Human Chair” is just bizarre, about a guy who lives inside a chair so a woman will sit on him. An adaptation of a story by Edogawa Ranpo, the Japanese Edgar Allan Poe. Over the weekend I finally got to reading Junji Ito’s manga, devouring all three volumes of Uzumaki in as many days. So while I haven’t exactly read enough of this horror master’s work to know what constitutes the “best” of his canon, I will say that the stories collected in Venus in the Blind Spot were mostly enjoyable—and rife with Ito’s trademark body horror ingenuity. The Human Chair- 3.5 stars This is a chilling story about a story being told to a woman in a shop as she views a chair that once belonged to a famous writer who was being stalked by someone who had sewn themselves into a chair in her home. Horrifying. No, thanks. I liked the concept, but this story was missing a certain something really that makes my horror heart skip some beats.

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Iwata reflects that this has been going on for some time: Mariko is visible from a distance, but disappears whenever she comes near. He, Kurata, Inoue, and a number of other men are all in love with her and joined the UFO Research Society to get close to her. Eventually, all the women in the society left, so now the group consists solely of Mariko's admirers. Her father didn't approve of this and wanted to shut the society down, but Mariko talked him out of it. Somehow, she began disappearing whenever she was in physical proximity to the men. Other people, including her father, don't have this problem and can see her normally. So here’s the thing with Ito: like HP Lovecraft, Ito is great at producing haunting images of primal horror but, also like Lovecraft, he’s very clumsy, almost amateurish, in incorporating these images into traditional stories. What you’re left with is some genuinely disturbing visions of horror scattered amidst numerous quite dull, predictable and almost laughably goofy stories. The Sad Tale of the Principal Post: A man is trapped under the principal post holding up a family’s new home. The entire house could collapse if it is moved. But, how did he end up trapped beneath it in the first place? Content warnings for: murder, torture, violence, body horror, corpse desecration, necrophilia, animal deaths, stalking, scenes of terror

Keepsake- 4.5 stars This story is so gross because it’s about a child who is born from a dead woman and if you get grossed out by SPOILER necrophilia SPOILER then skip this one. I loved the story and how it unfolded. It felt dramatic in the most twisted way. These first 3 stories are all amazing so far. Now it may also be that my husband playing a creepy video game with creepy music is enhancing the experience... I’m not very smart some days (lol!) This collection reminded me quite viscerally of when I was a kid and I’d spend my evenings reading horror folklore anthologies at my local library (featuring stories like “The Green Ribbon,” about a girl also named Jenny whose fate freaked me out for years). More disturbing than creepy I think... although the more I consider the story the creepier it becomes.The Sad Tale of the Principal Post- 3 stars This is the most forgettable story in the collection. The concept is there, but the execution isn’t fleshed out for it to be memorable or groundbreaking in the horror genre.