VENUS IN THE BLIND SPOT
VIZ MEDIA – @VIZMedia
[This review was originally posted on Patreon.]
CARTONIST: Junji Ito
TRANSLATION & ENGLISH ADAPTATION: Jocelyn Allen; Yuji Oniki (“The Enigma of Amigara Fault”)
LETTERS: Eric Erbes
EDITOR: Masumi Washington
ISBN: 978-1-9747-1547-3; hardcover; 5 3/4 × 8 1/4 (August 2020); Rated “T+” for “Teen Plus”
272pp, B&W, $22.99 U.S., $46.00 CAN, £25.00 UK
Junji Ito is a Japanese writer and artist of horror manga (comics) who has created both long-form horror manga series and manga short works (short stories). Ito's best known long-form manga include Tomie, Uzumaki, and Gyo. Tomie was adapted into a live-action film series (beginning in 1998), and Uzumaki was adapted into a live-action film (2000).
VIZ Media has published several hardcover collections of Junji Ito's manga short stories over the last five years. They are Fragments of Horror (June 2015), Shiver: Junji Ito Selected Stories (December 2017), Frankenstein: Junji Ito Story Collection (October 2018), and Smashed: Junji Ito Story Collection (April 2019).
VIZ's latest hardcover collection of Junji Ito's manga short stories is a “best of” collection, Venus in the Blind Spot. This striking book gathers ten of the most remarkable short works of Ito's career. With a deluxe presentation, including special color pages, each chilling tale invites readers to revel in a world of terror created by a modern master of horror manga and comics.
Venus in the Blind Spot includes three stories that Junji Ito adapted from prose fiction writers. Ito adapts two stories, “The Human Chair” (1925) and “An Unearthly Love” (1926), by Edogawa Ranpo (1984-1965), perhaps the most influential author of Japanese mystery fiction. Ito also adapts “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” (1900), a short story by Robert Hichens (1864-1950), a British author who, among other things, wrote ghost stories, fantasy, and mystery fiction.
Venus in the Blind Spot opens with the story, “Billions Alone.” At the center of this story is 19-year-old Michio, who has locked himself in his room for seven years. He emerges from seclusion as people are being found dead and sewn together in pairs, bound by fishing wire that has been run through every part of their bodies. Michio wonders that if he attends an upcoming school reunion and coming-of-age ceremony, will he become part of one of these “group corpses?”
A woman with a wicked tongue terrorizes the country as “The Licking Woman.” A philandering husband discovers a “Keepsake” from his recently deceased wife. And in the title story, “Venus in a Blind Spot,” the young men of the “Nanzan UFO Research Society” discover that they can't help but love their chairperson, Mariko Shono, but they can't see her either.
THE LOWDOWN: Junji It's short works (a.k.a. manga short stories) display his incredible imagination and also the diversity in the style and tone in which he executes these stories. Some are tales of existential terror and threats. Others feature terrible situations, a twist on a comic situation because, by the end of the story, the reader will laugh nervously while thanking the cosmos that such situations are not his.
Venus in the Blind Spot emphasizes two other signatures Ito types, macabre tales that recall “The Twilight Zone” and eerie stories of haunting. In such stories, Ito does not make use of beginnings, middles, and ends, so much as he offers episodes that are both terrifying and implausible.
The opening story, “Billions Alone,” is an episode of terror. It is not metaphorically a tale of loneliness as much as it is a tale of humans alone against an existential terror that does not make sense – an implausible and ridiculous assault on the way humans live. It is COVID-19 without the hope of science eventually saving our asses.
I have not read any of the three prose short stories that appear here as manga adaptations by Junji Ito. “The Human Chair” is an Ito gem, and I wonder if Edogawa Ranpo's original is as deranged as Ito's take on it. [Ranpo's huge cultural influence in Japan can be seen in Gosho Aoyama's manga, Detective Conan, which is published as Case Closed in North America.] The other two adaptations, “An Unearthly Love” and “How Love Came to Professor Kirida” (from Robert Hichens's “How Love Came to Professor Guildea”). These two stories have all the hallmarks of Ito's terrible power, and the latter is a tale of a haunting. Still, they don't quite come together.
Never fear, “The Licking Woman” and “Keepsake” lay siege to your imagination, dear reader, and these two tales, each dealing with a haunting, certainly made my skin crawl. Damn, that's nasty – both of them. Venus in the Blind Spot, as a collection, is a good introduction to the short manga of Junji Ito. New readers will get a taste of what is to come, and, in a way, it is not as deranged, overall, as other collections of Ito's short works. For Ito's fans, Venus in the Blind Spot is an example of why Junji Ito is our blind spot. We'll buy just about any book he offers us.
I READS YOU RECOMMENDS: Fans of Junji Ito and fans of great horror comics will want the VIZ Signature edition of Venus in the Blind Spot.
9 out of 10
Reviewed by Leroy Douresseaux a.k.a. "I Reads You"
The text is copyright © 2020 Leroy Douresseaux. All Rights Reserved. Contact this blog or site for syndication rights and fees.
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