At this point I have pretty much given up on Junji Ito’s work ever transfering well to an animated medium. It is true that maybe with higher production values and a more talented team than his work could potentially be brought to life but even with that I still think it would come up short. Not because Ito’s work is of such polished perfection that nothing other than manga drawings could capture it, actually it may be the opposite. Junji Ito’s work is very much pulp fiction(The term, not the movie) in that the stories themselves nor the characters are not the true selling point. I would compare Ito very much to HP Lovecraft whose work is often highly regarded due to its influential ideas but when judged on his actual quality they too are essentially pulp fiction short horror stories of hit or miss quality. The strength is in the presentation and ideas of the work but not so much on its narrative quality. Indeed Ito tends to rely to heavily on body horror and his stories can veer into goofiness when attempting to be unnerving and surreal. Thus a Junji Ito story without the high detail of his art and the paneling of a manga is like a lovecraft story without the inner monologue of the narrators building madness. Essentially a silly monster movie.

But well we have two stories today and the first one is rather interesting as it deals with the main protagonists house being connected to other worlds. In this case the protagonist Oshikiri is finding alternative world versions of his classmates which all seem to be either terrified of him or wishing revenge on him. The actual concept is fascinating but the story does have its fair share of holes. For one if Oshikiri is aware that his house is a portal to other dimensions then why in god’s name is he still living in it? The big twist as well is that there are alternative world versions of himself which are murderers experimenting with humans in order to make a formula to make humans grow taller. It doesn’t really make sense that a teenager would be fooling around with science, especially one that doesn’t seem all that gifted intellectually and the killer Oshikiri’s motivation is just absolutely juvenile. Still I liked the final climax with Oshikiri and the girl trapped in the house wandering through infinite worlds potentially filled with killer Oshikiris. Also from the look of things there appears to be a sequel story to this so I wonder just where it will go with that.

And for the second story we have a return to the nail biting teenager chuunibyou whose fond of casting life threatening curses on his classmates. It’s clear by the presentation that his actions are more for black comedy than genuine horror but I find it falling flat on both fronts. The comedy is well…childish at best as we are apparently supposed to laugh over Souchi pants being pulled down? I mean yeah, I suppose it’s good to see this kid get some comeupence but this is some Dennis the menace level humor here.As for the horror I just find it offset by the comedy as it’s trying to push it as light hearted but the truth of this matter is that this kid has attempted to kill a lot of people. Yet others seem to be letting him off fairly easy for it. He gets a few nails to the butt and that’s it? If this kid got his way his two teachers and a student would be dead. I just can’t really enjoy this kids antics when he’s such an unlikeable wart of a character. So I hope he doesn’t have too many stories left in this season as they are clearly not gelling with the horror that the series is going for.

Today’s stories fell a bit flat for me as one of Ito’s tendencies to not explain his horrors actually somewhat backfired. In the first story we had a tale about a jade stone which cursed people with a disease that causes holes to open up on their body. The story itself was relatively simple but I can’t help but notice some logical inconsistencies. For one they state that the girl next door had been afflicted with this hole disease for all her life and yet when other people are infected they die within days. So what was this girl so special that she lived so long with the disease? The disease itself doesn’t make much sense either and while Ito does tend to stretch credibility to make his monsters come to life, here is another example where I feel he pushing things too far. This hole disease does create holes in the body as shown by the last victim who even had one of his eyeballs falling out of it’s socket due to a hole under his eye. Yet the victim can still somehow live which makes me wonder just how blood circulation works when the body is full of holes. Who was the doctor and why was he connected with the stone? Frankly I feel the horror of the story fails because we as the audience just know far too little of the situation to get what is even happening. At most we can speculate and even with that we have far too little information.

The Marionette Mansion story also has issues but at least there is more to work with when it comes to that story. Being about a brother that comes back to town and mysteriously his family are controlled by strings like puppets. The key factor her appears to be the puppet at the end who somehow must have been in control of all the strings. If i had to guess I would believe that the brother never actually came back to the town and the family which our protagonist was talking to was just puppets controlled by Jean-Pierre. The reason I believe was to somehow trick the protagonist and his sister into joining the house as it appears the older brother abandoned the puppet, he needs a human to be “complete” so to speak. Though in this puppets case he wanted the roles to be reversed. Again this story has it’s holes, namely that if the main protagonist found the house to be so suspicious then why did he keep coming back to it? He was clearly wary of the house and it’s puppet antics and yet he still let his sister stay there and kept coming back. Also why did the puppet freak out so much over the jealous girlfriend and attack the protag? How does the house ever work in regards to being controlled by strings all day? How do the puppeteers know what they want to do? The final reveal just kinda felt on the weak side as it was pretty obvious that was the case.

If there is a big flaw with these stories though it would be the endings. I have noticed this so far with all the stories but they tend to end far too suddenly. There isn’t really a sense of finality to the conclusion, instead it feels like the story just stops suddenly and is rather unsatisfying as a result. Even if that is the stories ending in the manga it would be better to dwell on it a bit to let the ending sink in before cutting to the credits. Another issue is with the presentation which while fine is still far too similar to watching a slideshow of the manga. Their is very little animation or attempts to truly adapt these stories to screen. They are essentially the manga put into an animated format without any real adjustment. Which may be fine for purests but when the anime just ends up an inferior version of the manga then people might as well just read the manga instead.

Our two stories today regard the handsome man at the crossroads and slug girl. The handsome man story was given the most screen time and it is a decent story, albeit unfinished. What was presented here was only the first part of the story and I believe it will be continued in later episodes. But what we have here is a town haunted by a mysterious figure whom people have taken to asking about their love life. Which would be fine if the mysterious figure didn’t always claim that their love would be unfulfilled and his words have such an effect that the girls commit suicide. There’s never really and explanation as to why or how this monsters came to be but if I had to make a guess I would say the monster of this town is the mysterious fog that appears whenever the pretty boy is walking about. The catalyst for these events seems to be an incident in the main characters past, where he told a pregnant woman that her love was doomed and that caused her to commit suicide. This appears to have given the fog a taste for blood as it appears to be trying to trap more girls souls within it by spawning the pretty boy and having him make girls commit suicide. At least that’s my interpretation though it doesn’t quite explain that the murders seems to only start up once the main character moved back into town.

The big question here is whether the handsome mans words are some kind of mind control considering the effect he has on his victims or if the mans words only have such an effect because they cause the victim to realise something. We have a case here of a girls friend asking the pretty boy about her friends love life only for the pretty boy to say that she should worry about her own. His words causing the girl to aggressively pursue the main character as though he were her last chance at love. Eventually leading to her suicide when he rejects her numerous advances. Considering how the girl becomes like a woman possessed as she transforms into a ugly visage of herself it would be easy to say that it’s all just some form of mind control. However it could be that this girl did have worries about her own love life and the pretty boy’s words merely confirmed her greatest fears of never finding love. Thus she pushes herself to find love no matter what and her efforts just backfired disastrously. Though it could be some kind of primal instinct stimulated that pushes for the ultimatum of either procreate or die. Thus this begs the question that if the main character did accept her advances then could she have potentially gone back to normal?

Slug girl was given the shorter runtime of five minutes but the story it presents is a rather good example of Junji’s approach to absurdist horror. There is no explanation as to why it happened but for some reason a girls tongue turned into a slug. While the first transformation was horric, the second does bring to light a certain problem I have with Junji ito’s works. Name that Ito has a tendency to go a bit too silly with his ideas. An example would be a chapter from his work Uzumaki where the people of the town gain the ability to create whirlwinds by spinning their fingers. A rather weird tonal shift for what was a rather tense grim story. Here we have the parents of the girl convince her to bath in a bath full of salt to kill the slug. I feel the parents went a bit overkill by having her bath in salt considering that her mouth was the main area affected and oddly enough this resulted in the girls body completely disappearing, leaving her as just a head with a slug coming out of its mouth like some kind of messed up snail. The implication that the girl is somehow still alive despite being reduced to a snail shell is a rather disturbing concept but I just find the logic of it to be rather flimsy. Sure it’s all fiction and it doesn’t make sense to have her tongue turn into a slug in the first place but it just feels like Junji had a disturbing idea and took it to too much of an extreme to be taken seriously.

After the first episode started off as a black comedy, I was worried that this series may suffer the same problem as Kino’s Journey in that the weaker stories in his work would be chosen for adaption. Lucky this does not appear to be the case but there is another problem which is not quite as easy to resolve. Junji Ito’s work has always faced problems regarding his work getting adapted, much in the same way that Stephen King’s work has had a lineup of failed adaptions. The big issue with Ito’s work is that the quality of it isn’t so much in the characters and writing but rather the idea and artistic value. Ito knows how to think up disturbing and strange horror concepts and work to illustrate and panel them to become massively unnerving. However when you strip away his artstyle, the apparent silliness of his ideas becomes more visible. Much like how Ufotables adaption of Gyo turned out, which was an admirable effort but sadly didn’t quite succeed. The live action efforts are marred by bad CGI and other factors, though the Tomie movies seem to have succeeded to a degree. Now Deen are taking a stab at it and their take appears to be sacrificing movement for detail. This has been a double edged sword as while this anime may be the closest to Ito’s style, the lack of movement makes it very much like a slideshow of the manga at times.

Our first story brings to front Ito’s style of using unconventional and sometimes humorously strange monsterities. It features a horrifically monstrous model whom a college film crew decide to include in their movie. Without Ito’s signature style this story could very easily fall flat on its face but it actually succeeds in being rather creepy here. I like it for being a bit of the subversion of the heart of gold trope in that usually in anime and media, a monstrously ugly person actually turns out to be nice and misunderstood. However in this episode we have a monstrous looking woman whom everyone gives the benefit of the doubt but really turns out to be just as horrific a monster as she appears. For judging book by its cover is bad but that doesn’t mean that someone can’t have an ugly appearance and an ugly personality as well. It also shows the deep discomfort of having caught the undivided attention of someone whom you don’t find attractive or the torment of being stalked. The main character has caught the attention of this monstrous creature and it’s quite disturbing to think that this woman won’t so much rip him apart with her fangs but instead…ugh…eat him in another sense. If i had a problem with the stories presentation it would be that the ending was rather abrupt and parts of the original story showing how the main distorted the women’s image in his head was missing but otherwise it was strongly shown how uncomfortable the situation was.

The second story is Ito at his best as while not really scary in the usual sense but the very idea of it is deeply unsettling. Detailing a story about a hospital patient who is experiencing long dreams, dreaming in which he spends large amounts of time stuck in and growing longer by the day. While time passes normally for everyone else, the patient goes to sleep and lives through 8 years in his dream. This is contrast by another woman whom has a massive fear of death and believes she will die soon. One is scared of their time getting cut short while another is terrified that their dream will continue for eternity. It’s a pity that the anime cut out a few panels with the patient describing his dreams such as 10 years as a soldier wandering a jungle, 6 years cramming for student tests and 8 years with a full bladder searching for a toilet that doesn’t exist. Made worse when his body begins to adjust to the time he spends in dreams and age prematurely, eventually transforming into a macabre husk. Leaving only dust and strange crystals behind. The last scene make for an interesting twist as the doctor treating him administers the crystals to the woman which in turn gives her long dreams as well. The doctor rationalises this that a eternal nightmare is better than the void of nothingness that death could very well be. Personally I find the idea of being trapped in my own mind for a century in a single night to be a atrocious alternative to death. But well if you can get the internet in there, maybe I would think about it. The presentation falls a bit shorter in this story but luckily the story itself is enough to carry it.