She is believed to have committed suicide and soon after her body was discovered, a giant balloon with her face is spotted floating around the area. The narrative then jumps back in time to a month earlier, when a young Japanese idol is discovered hanging from a telephone wire outside her house. She is starving and a creature using her own voice is attempting to lure her out. Hanging Blimp (also known as The Hanging Balloons) begins with the story’s protagonist trapped in her house and unable to leave without risking death. For your reference, the stories I will be discussing are ‘Hanging Blimp’, ‘Painter’ and ‘The Long Dream’. You can purchase the book here from Amazon.īefore I launch into my analysis, I must first warn you that this post contains major plot spoilers and if you do not want to lose the shock value which comes with reading these stories for the first time, I recommend that you return to this article after you have them.
Each story is accompanied with a brief commentary and notes. Shiver is a manga collection containing nine short stories picked by Junji Ito himself. Super Eyepatch Wolf (what a name!) further praises Ito’s ability to make something as ordinary a house cat (see his work Cat Diary) appear eerie and disturbing. Instead, Junji Ito’s narratives and illustrations focus on subverting and de-familiarising the ordinary world to unsettle his readers. However, it was his short story collections, Shiver and Fragments of Horror, which made him one of my favourite storytellers within the genre.Īs YouTuber Super Eyepatch Wolf explains in How Media Scares Us: The Work of Junji Ito, what makes him so unique as a horror writer and artist is that he rarely uses pre-established monster archetypes within his work. His most notable works are Tomie, Gyo and Uzumaki – all of which are wonderfully weird and creepy in their own way. Since his debut in 1987, Ito has established his own legacy both within Japanese and Western (thank you, Viz Media) Contemporary Horror.
His biggest influences are classic horror manga artists Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino, as well as the authors Yasukata Tsutsui and H.P.
With Halloween right around the corner and the blogging community already getting into the spookiest of spirits, posting and sharing articles on all things creepy, I thought I would make my contribution by writing on my favourite Junji Ito’s short stories from his newest collection, Shiver.įor those of you who have not read a lot of manga and / or are not familiar with his work, Junji Ito is a Japanese horror manga artist.
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