Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Collection

Product Information

Bittersweet Ending: While at the end, the boy at the crossroads and ghosts seem to be gone, many lives have been ruined by intersection fortune-telling and the protagonist must bear the burden of restoring and aiding the town as it continues its practice. The other short stories included are more disturbing than creepy but round out a very good horror collection. A traumatized Teshima runs back to Ryuusuke's place and tells him everything, and begins to question Ryuusuke whether he's unconsciously materializing as the Intersection Bishounen. Though advertised as a story collection, this book more closely resembles the release of Ito’s adaptation of Frankenstein from late 2018 than the likes of Shiver, Smashed, or Venus in the Blind Spot.

The outsider finishes his questions and notes that all though it's still foggy the town has gotten a lot more quiet. Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, he was inspired from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's comics and thus took an interest in drawing horror comics himself. No review would be complete without mentioning the art--so effective and evocative here, as always, with Ito's style, where panels of inchoate lines representing fog and shadow add beats and suspense between the action and dialogue, in such a perfectly paced way. Angry and desperate, Midori tries to play the game, only to run into the real Intersection Bishounen, who tells her to hate Ryuusuke for the rest of her life. By the end of the first chapter we learn of Ryusuke’s uncanny connection to the suicides taking place and, more importantly, much of the predictability dissolved away.When a mass suicide occurs, the fog turns red from the blood, and when Ryusuke becomes the boy in white, the fog becomes softer and more ethereal. I really loved a lot of Ito’s art in this story too, which made great use of fog and portrayed the spirits of the boy’s victims as stupendously horrifying to look upon, especially as they linger longer and longer in the world of the living. The story begins with a girl playing "Intersection Fortune Telling", the latest trend with schoolgirls in the area. For example: A girl's hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head; Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other; a woman treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister's skin, etc. Our Ghosts Are Different: The spirits of the girls who died look more solid and take the form of their rotting corpses, though it's never clear how physical they are.

The Pretty Boy starts killing teenage girls and women that seek his fortune and it's blamed on Ryusuke. One of the motifs I've seen in many of his novels is that the protagonist is a young, pretty person who drives people insane, and Lovesickness is no exception.

The latter – about a girl who has ribs removed to achieve a perfect waistline, only to find herself haunted by plaintive music – is particularly gripping and creepy. He is seemingly killed by the ghosts of the girls who played the game and the Intersection Bishounen, but in the end, he becomes the White-Clothed Pretty Boy, who spreads happiness to girls playing the game. But, the next day, the woman came back to Midori's house looking for more advice about her situation. Everything culminated in an ending that felt surprisingly definitive and satisfying, while still keeping things nebulous. He inspires another couple the same age as him and Midori to fall in love and help carry out his duties, as well as a depressed businessman to find a new purpose in life.

He doesn’t appear in ‘The Boy in White’, which is instead narrated by a man who comes to the city having heard rumours of its multiple suicides. He begins to notice weird things such as his ears getting pierced over night and being chased by lovestruck girls.Still, despite the seemingly unavoidable crap (literal in one instance here) that crops up in every short story anthology, this was one of Junji Ito’s better collections. Pretty Boy: Both the beautiful boy at the crossroads and Ryuusuke, as the boy in white are depicted with femininely attractive faces and gain the term " Bishōnen" as an epithet in the original Japanese text. Thank you so much to the publisher for providing me with this review copy in exchange for an honest review!

Disproportionate Retribution: Ryusuke as a kid unthinkingly told a pregnant woman that the man who knocked her up would never love her, while he was trying to run away from home. A young woman wants a more shapely figure so opts for rib removal surgery which somehow leads to a rib ghost?The mystery surrounding the seemingly inhuman, heartless beautiful boy is intriguing and I like how the story is played out with its own inner logic. Lovesickness by Junji Ito is the latest story collection by the horror manga author to be published in English by VIZ media.