And that continues to be the case in his new collection Lovesickness, which features the titular story as well as two “Strange Hizikuri Siblings stories and three unrelated horror yarns. Junji Ito is probably my favorite manga creator, and he is a master of finding terror in the everyday escalating normal situations into something resembling cosmic horror. People’s History of the Marvel Universe.Lovesickness is not Ito's best work, but he still shows you things you haven't seen before, and that's a rare thing. "Phantom Mansion" is a different take on a haunted house, and "Ribs Woman" is one of Ito's better horror tales with its wallow in gore and body horror, and once again, insane, grotesque women. "Memories of Real Shit" is an inconsequential story about a boy's obsession with shit that's a one-note joke that doesn't land at all. Two feature his regular characters, the Addams Family-esque Hizikuri siblings, a creepy brother and sister who wreck darkly comic havoc wherever they go. The other five stories in the collection seem to point to Ito being a prankster and put-on artist as much as he is a master of horror.
He could just be playing with pulp tropes. Ito's misanthropy is so gleeful that he may not really mean it. It's as if people are victims of their impulses and have no free will. Women are hysterical and irrational! Men are only marginally less so, prone to obsession themselves. There's a tinge of sexism in the way the girls and women desperately define themselves by whether they find true love and then go nuts and kill themselves when told they'll be alone. It's a dark comedy that reveals a very pessimistic view of humanity that's a common thread in Ito's stories. On a certain level, the situation and the characters are so over the top that they start to feel like players in a comedy. Reading the Lovesickness stories again after the initial sense of shock from the 90s can put them in a different light. Soon the entire town has gone insane, and the hero can only watch helplessly as things just go to hell. The women and girls who killed themselves frequently haunt the same crossroads as ghosts eager to drag you to hell. A surly teen moves back to town after a few years away and decides to hunt down and stop this ghostly man, only to be mistaken for him and chased by girls for love advice. His cynical advice often drives them to insanity and suicide. If they seek a ghostly handsome man in the fog, he can tell them if they will ever find true love. This series of stories is about an urban legend that high school girls and some adults believe in slavishly.
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