Junji Ito adapts Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel Frankenstein in this book, which also includes a number of short stories, most of them featuring a creepy kid called Oshikiri. I wasn’t that taken with the Frankenstein adaptation but the short stories were pretty decent.
I’d hoped that he would do something different with the story - like a contemporary version or modify it in some way - but Ito’s Frankenstein is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Shelley’s cumbersome and overrated novel.
Do I need to say SPOILERS for an adaptation of a 200+ year old novel? There we go anyway.
Even putting aside the absurdity of stitching together corpses into a giant humanoid monster animated by electricity, Shelley’s story is full of poorly conceived rubbish. Like how the monster learns language, critical thinking and a number of other things through a hole in a woodshed adjoined to a house where the inhabitants just happen to be going over those subjects. And he’s never caught and he picks it up that quickly? I mean, come on.
The maid is executed for murdering Frankenstein’s little brother, solely on the “evidence” that she had the boy’s pendant on her person. That’s 18th century justice for ya! And then later when he creates the Bride of Frankenstein, he just happens to come across a town full of freshly deceased young women! And all he needs is his sewing kit and some jars of liquid to animate the Bride because it’s just that easy to create life!
I know, it’s a fantasy, and an allegory about the then-contemporary fear of resurrection men, but it’s still a very silly story. Mary Shelley was 21 years old when it was published and it reads like something someone very young would cobble together. I’ve just read this same story far too many times to get anything out of yet another retelling of it. Still, Ito’s artwork is excellent and the monster does truly look terrifying. If you’re not disposed to trudging through Shelley’s novel but would like to read a more accessible/concise version, Ito’s Frankenstein does the trick.
The Oshikiri stories are the highlight of the book. The first two aren’t that great though. The Neck Spector is about Oshikiri murdering his friend because he grew taller than him, but then is haunted by images of lengthening limbs everywhere. The Bog of Living Spirits is about Oshikiri’s popular friend who decides to escape his obsessed fan club of schoolgirls by faking his own death and running away. But does he make it away to freedom - or has he actually died in the bog...?
The Neck Spector is a weird story as it glosses over the strangest detail: that a schoolboy would murder his friend for something as natural as growing! And The Bog of Living Spirits is a very Japanese story - most Western teenage boys, swamped by the attention of girls in their school, would probably welcome it and have sex with them all, rather than run away! Anyhoo, they’re fairly unremarkable tales - Oshikiri is haunted by strange happenings, etc. ho hum.
Pen Pal is where the stories start to get interesting. It’s about an odd girl (it’s quite a school Oshikiri goes to!) who pretends she has imaginary pen pals that write her letters - and then the letters turn nasty once she befriends Oshikiri and things get darker and darker from there. It’s an unpredictable and increasingly tense narrative with a fine ending.
Intruder unexpectedly ties into Neck Spector as Oshikiri’s eerie empty mansion turns out to be a portal to another dimension and an evil version of Oshikiri is entering this dimension to bury the bodies of his victims. It’s a fascinating development of this character’s story and explains why Ito kept writing stories featuring this schoolboy character. That’s why he was so crazy in Neck Spector but then behaved normally in the other stories - it was evil Oshikiri in the first story and the regular kid in the others.
The Strange Tale of Oshikiri continues exploring evil Oshikiri’s character as he infiltrates the regular Oshikiri’s dimension more and more. Some really disturbing visuals in this one, otherwise a fairly meh story with no real attempt at explaining how dimension-hopping is a thing (not that any explanation would suffice really)!
The Walls is my favourite story of the collection. An earthquake opens up some old walls in the house revealing the corpses buried within them - and then his long-missing parents suddenly return from working abroad. Or are they his parents…? Definitely the scariest and most macabre story here.
The collection closes out with some throwaway short-short stories. The Hell of the Doll Funeral, about a couple whose daughter transforms into a doll, is visually striking, but not much else. Face Firmly in Place is a Pit and the Pendulum-esque story of a woman trapped in a surgical device by her ears - but how will she escape? For such a nightmarish story, it was an unusual choice to close out with a jokey ending that wasn’t that great. And the Boss Non-Non shorts about Ito’s dog were instantly forgettable.
Ironically, Junji Ito’s Frankenstein book is worth reading for the non-Frankenstein material. The art is strong in Frankenstein but the story is too well known to me at this point to be at all interesting - and I wasn’t that enthralled with it the first time either! The Oshikiri stories are a mixed bunch but have a lot of imaginative and compelling horror scenes in them to make this book worth checking out for fans of this author and/or horror manga.
No comments:
Post a Comment