In a small Japanese town, teenagers believe that if they wait in the street for a stranger to pass by, hide their face, and ask for their fortunes to be told, they will find out what love the future holds in store for them. Except a beautiful - but cursed - boy walks the streets and soon the town is dealing with a spate of teen suicides brought about by… Lovesickness!
Junji Ito’s Lovesickness collection is really more of a graphic novel with some short stories tacked on at the end because the stories that comprise the main story take up about 250 of the 400 pages in this book. Unfortunately the main story also isn’t among the better parts of the collection but it’s a decent book overall.
At the very least, Lovesickness is an original idea - I’ve never heard of hiding your face and asking strangers for fortunes - but it’s also a hella stupid one. Why would you put any faith in a stranger’s fortune? The identity of the beautiful boy at the crossroads is never fully revealed and doesn’t really make sense - it’s something to do with the main character returning to the town?
The story’s quite atmospheric though and the creepy fog makes the narrow Japanese streets seem claustrophobic. Ito’s art is first rate as always, even if his character designs get recycled from book to book - the woman with the full-body tattoo and some of the decayed ghosts look incredible and grotesque. And I appreciate that Ito never shies away from drawing crowd scenes. I know some writer/artists tend to avoid writing stories with big crowds because they don’t want to draw that many figures in each panel but Ito never cops out like that.
The imagery or the stories are never scary though - Ito’s horror is so absurdly over the top that it’s too silly to take seriously. Especially all the schoolgirl suicides - they all just happen to carry box cutters and they all decide to kill themselves within moments of the beautiful boy telling them a dumb fortune? It’s dark humour but that to me is more comedic than horrific.
My biggest issue with Lovesickness is how repetitive and overlong it is. Characters get driven mad by the beautiful boy, over and over and over again. It wasn’t that interesting to begin with but to read it for 250 pages is too much. Also the ending is very weak - as all of Ito’s endings tend to be - and just fizzles out anticlimactically.
The two stories of The Strange Hikizuri Siblings are the best in the book in part because Ito leans into the humour that’s more or less always there in his work, rather than try to make it seem only horrific. The Hikizuri family are a group of weird nutters, almost like a Japanese Addams family, who, in the first story, decide to mess with their sister’s new boyfriend, and, in the second, the younger brother tries to usurp the older brother’s role as head of the family by faking a seance. The stories are fun and unpredictable and the Hikizuri’s are amusingly bonkers.
The Mansion of Phantom Pain is also a decent story about a young man who gets a job at a rich person’s house where he has to relieve the man’s son’s pain that has somehow, invisibly filled the mansion. This one’s a good example of Ito’s unique imagination - it’s something only he could come up with. I was hooked waiting to see where he’d take the story, and it was mostly interesting, though, again the ending is weak.
The Rib Woman is the worst story of the collection. A young woman wants a more shapely figure so opts for rib removal surgery which somehow leads to a rib ghost?! And the book closes out with a short piece of nonfiction where Ito recalls the time he bought fake joke poop as a kid, which was rubbish and a pointless addition.
Ironically, Lovesickness is worth reading not for the titular story but for the others included in this collection. 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.
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