Ugh, I was lucky I ate before that first story started. Not so much scary but very disgusting with the oily dirty house and that brother with the pimples…ugh. This story is more gross out factor than actual horror as there isn’t really a plot besides this girl living with her horrible family in a house so disgusting that it’s amazing that she has not run away from home yet. The big twist involves the father killing his son and serving him up as meat for his restaurant.(Holy hell, the health inspector would have a heart attack at this place.) The meat prove popular and the father starts trying to fatten up his daughter by forcing her to drink oil while she sleeps.(Um…how can you sleep when someone’s forcing oil down your throat?) Daughter catches on so the father ends up chopping off his own foot to be cooked. End of story. You may think I left out some sort of conclusion their but really, that’s how the story ends. no resolution. I originally thought the father would start hunting people to sell as meat in his restaurant and it exploding into some kind of pandemic with oil polluting the neighborhood like in the girls dreams but nope. Father starts eating himself, end of story.
The second story is equally lackluster as it details about a village with a strange funeral ceremony of floating their dead down a river and the dead calling to a girls grandmother to come join them. There are implications that the dead end up trapped on earth when the corpse falls off the mat it’s placed on and judging from the three funerals shown, this appears to always happen. Again there is no real conclusion to the story besides the grandmother being floated down the river and joining the other spirits. I guess the idea of the dead calling out for you to join them could be a scary prospect when you are close to death but there does seem to be a lack of threat here. The ghosts are not really attacking or being dangerous, more mild annoyance. The final twist appears to be that the girls recently dead grandmother reached out to her through her dreams to try and get her to stop her corpse from being floated down the river.
Fat load of good that did, she watched the whole thing from start to finish without interfering at all, no wonder her grandmother’s corpse looked pissed. These two stories have the common aspect of having main characters who are more just obseversors to the tale rather than participant which does happen often in his tales. There are plenty of his tales where the main character more or less acts as a tool to explain the strange happenings rather than interact with it. There sole purpose being to encounter or explain about the horrific things Junji dreams up. They are not the main driving force of the story, more an avatar to get an outsider’s perspective on it. Hence why his tales don’t really include an arc or some sort of conclusion for the character in question as the goal is more to expose the horrific nature of the situation.
