STATUES - JUNJI ITO (trans. Jocelyne Allen)

Continuing to work my way through the Ito as they translate and release it here in the Occidental world. Predictibly, it’s amazing and bizarre. A small handful of stories that don’t have a through line. I’m not sure if, in Japan, these are taken from various magazines and collected, the way a short story writer might collect their magazine work, or if they are published like they are here, just as a collection of stories by the same artist. There’s no introduction or context or anything, which is nice. One could easily imagine some tedious essay about Ito and Japanese culture or how he captures a particularly Japanese sort of horror. Instead, the work speaks uninterrupted or contextualized. Seems obvious that in a collection of stories some would be better than others, I would say there were no “misses,” each story was cool and creepy and worth seeing. I won’t just summerize them all, you can usually guess from the titles, like “statues” or “suicide note” what the general topic will be. Some are a little more obvious like, “what if a circus was evil” but the drawings are upsetting and original enough for this to be worth it. Others seem to start with an obvious premise like, “what if a scarecrow was evil?” and then crank it up a notch in terms of weirdness and horror. There is a story about wasps that contains some drawings that will send those suffering from trypophobia into convulsions. I wonder how many more of these there are left? Ideally a lot. He’s really one of those guys who scratches an itch that no one else has even identified, every time you reach for him. The consistency is admirable.