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MANGA DramaItou Junji Tanpenshuu: BEST OF BEST

REVIEWS

• 

  TheGruesomeGoblin

  80/100
  One of Junji Ito's firsts and a respectful take on a really creepy and weird short story by Ranpo Edogawa.

  I know what you're thinking. What's the point of reviewing a oneshot? Your review is bound to probably have more words that this one shot does. But this is not just some no ordinary oneshot. It is Junji ito's oneshot, the earliest thing (that I know of) by him that exists somewhere in a viewable format. This review in addition to being about Junji Ito's earliest work, is also intended to be sort of... an introduction into him, I suppose.

  On spoilers, first of all, again, it's a oneshot. Secondly, with the title alone, you've already sort of pictured what the whole thing is in your head already, haven't you? If you do care about spoilers for things you might not read and still for whatever reason with to continue reading this review (???) then I genuinely just recommend giving it a try. It's a short read and if you truly just really do not like it (mind you, you're supposed to feel creeped out and uncomfortable, that's the whole point. HORROR!), then you probably know you're not going to be a Junji Ito fan because this is a similar to a lot of his other works following this.

  

  If you don't know who Junji Ito, well, that's probably because you don't or haven't read any of his stuff because you don't do horror... or really weird stuff... or bizarre stuff... or stuff that's just really nasty and grotesque perhaps possibly in the best way. You open up a Junji Ito manga and you walk down a spiraling labyrinth of weird monsters, classic monsters like vampires but given a weird as shit Junji Ito twist that actually brings them back to original, or maybe you just fucking end up losing your shit and end up going into a "you" shaped hole.

  

  There are a handful of mangaka that I follow that I can honestly say that if I could, I would just fucking love to just take a peep into their fucked up minds. Junji Ito is up there, absolutely. From the weirdness of Tomie, this weirdly popular girl (who just won't die) that somehow seems to have a magnetic pull on the opposite gender to always disastrous results, to Gyo's rotten fish and the goddamned shark on spider legs coming through the wall, to the fucking crazy ass mysterious and constantly looming spirals of Uzumaki...

  Junji Ito is never boring. Sure, if you read enough of his stories, there's definitely a basic format and structure throughout all of them you can begin to see after a while... but it's always something new. Apart from a few oddballs among his short manga collections, most of his manga are just full of completely separated and individual stories in which there is usually a monster in wait. Whether it's... giant balloon headed doppelgangers of yourself and your friends and family that fly around up in the sky and essentially swoop down after you with a noose in an attempt to hang you so they can replace you for good up in the sky or simply a vampire man who rather than just biting right into your neck instead makes berry bushes formed of your blood grow out of your neck.

  Or... maybe it's just a goddamned chair.

  

  What's weird about this oneshot is that it's not an original Junji Ito story. It is in fact inspired by Ranpo Edogawa. As far as I've gathered, when someone tries and takes the stories of this apparently really really really good as well as famous mystery writer and do something with them, it ends in complete fucking disaster. Like with that, they even do the chair thing in it. But the way they do it is just so bizarrely and hilariously bad that it's just... and yet here we have Junji Ito being totally respectful towards the original source material.

  But he also twists it into his own Junji Ito version of the story that actually works and is actually... really fucking creepy and quite frankly it only seems as if it's just gone further down the path the original source material had already put out there (fun fact, this is the only Ranpo Edogawa story that actually has a page for it that exists on Wikipedia).

  

  Like that whole idea that two people would willingly spend the rest of their lives with each other in the back of a goddamned armchair and then they actually reproduce and have a son and it's just "okay, your parents live in the back of a chair, that's fine and normal"? What the fuck. Quite frankly I'm usually not too fond if something or someone is trying to purposely be weird for the sake of being weird, but this is different.

  This is calculated weirdness. Like from the image of that armchair, it seems like he actually fucking thought about how one would position themselves in the back of an armchair. You can see cans of food, bottles... a knife he used to murder someone who sat in the armchair with which I'm still quite frankly curious how in the fuck he somehow used while also sitting in the back of the armchair.

  But in the long run, since it's a Junji Ito story, you don't really need to know. That's a lot more debatable with some of his other series, but I feel if you're going into a Junji Ito manga caring about the plot, you're starting a bit off on the wrong foot.

  Trust me, I know.

  

  What the fuck. We started with rotten fish monsters and sharks on spider legs, and now there's like a fucking circus and spirits of the dead showing up. What the fuck is the meaning of any of this. Is it a science experiment or is it supernatural, what the FUCK.

  To be fair, Gyo is very much a whole... other thing on its own (THE ANIME VERSION ESPECIALLY OH MY GOD), but that was how I started my own Junji Ito journey. Gyo, Ufotable's version. What a fucking uphill climb it's been since then from literally the very bottom.

  Anyhow, I didn't just want to review this oneshot because it's Ito's first or just go on about him in general. But because for one, it's the one example I have of someone taking something of Ranpo Edogawa's and not turning it into complete SHIT, but also for two, even now, after however many of his collections I've gone through, this one story of his is still burned into my mind and it's probably pretty far up towards the top.

  It might also have something to do with the recent news as it causes wondrous glee within me that Yami Shibai will no longer simply be completely uncontested as it continues on into a sixth season, then a seventh, then so on... forever. We'll have Yami Shibai forever. That's the true horror.

  Point is, Human Chair is short but great. 8 out of 10. Junji Ito himself is great. Similar to Stephen King (mind you, Ito outright shows us his shit in a visual form because manga), Ito has horrible fucking things living inside of his head and I genuinely want to see more of them as a horror fan. Continue drawing horrible nightmares, my good man!

  
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