A mysterious young woman stumbles across an eerie mansion during a stormy night and meets a pair of haunted sisters with a horrible secret - and what’s that strange noise coming from the attic? Then, a widower remarries only to find her first husband returned from the dead - and looking for revenge against her new family? Only Orochi, the mysterious young woman, knows the truth behind these tales.
Kazuo Umezz’s (or Umezu, as it’s written elsewhere - no idea where the extra Z comes from here, or what makes this book the “Perfect Edition”) first volume of Orochi, his horror manga from 1969-70, collects two complete stories: Sisters and Bones. I like the art style and aspects of the stories are compelling, but overall the stories are melodramatic to the point of silliness and poorly constructed so that entire plot points are absurdly contrived and undermine them so they come off as goofy more than scary.
Orochi herself isn’t so much a character as a framing and plot device. She’s part stand-in for the reader as observer, and then a story catalyst when needed. Who she is, what she wants, what she’s doing, all of that stuff that usually comes with a character is left unexplained. Her powers are undefined so that Umezz can have her do whatever when the plot calls for it. So, at various times, she can mind control characters, have super strength so she can punch through walls with her bare fists, psychically see through the eyes of subjects in paintings, create human-sized life-like dolls and then imbue them with life by dripping her blood on them, bring back the dead, and use strands of her hair as a makeshift GPS!
It’s lazy, bad writing as Umezz can write himself out of any corner he finds himself in by adding another power to the “character”. It also gives the story an air of childishness, like you’re listening to a story by a kid who hasn’t thought things out and is just making up nonsense as he goes along.
Similarly, the stories themselves are more than a tad bonkers. The teen sisters in the first story believe their family is cursed so that when they turn 18, they lose their looks and become ugly. Because their insane mother said so. This leads to increasingly unhinged behaviour and an almost comically hysterical finale.
The second story, Bones, sees a troubled woman called Chie escape her horrible life by marrying the seemingly flawless Saburo who then dies after a series of accidents. Chie makes a big show of grieving his death before suddenly remarrying shortly after Orochi (who’s working in this story as a nurse for no reason) tells her she can bring him back to life, and then magically does.
In the same way that he doesn’t explain anything about Orochi’s powers, Umezz glosses over the fact that when Saburo is brought back from the dead, most of his body is rotted, as you would expect from a corpse who’s been dead for some time, but then he somehow regrows his flesh so that he looks less like a skeleton and more like he was prior to his death. But only parts of him regrow - conveniently, his tongue doesn’t, so he can’t speak to Chie and try to understand what’s going on, or talk to her about his wants or what happened. Also, parts of him are completely skeletal but other parts are normal - he even looks chubby at times!
Like the first story, the ending to the second story builds to a manic flurry of odd choices, confusing motivations, daffy twists and anticlimactic grimness for grimness’ sake. You can really see Umezz’s limitations as a writer here and it’s this low-level ability that might have been why his manga wasn’t published in English for decades until the mid 2000s.
I enjoyed Sisters more than Bones. The first half of Sisters is decent and aspects of Sisters are pretty fun, like the sounds from the attic, and the general air of gothic-ness. The art is very accomplished though you can tell it’s old-timey manga. Maybe it’s the effect of Osamu Tezuka’s popularity from back then but the character designs are overly cutesy, particularly the women. The choice not to reveal the mother’s face in Sisters was a clever and effective one.
Junji Ito has said that Kazuo Umezz was an influence on his work, so maybe Ito fans will get something out of Umezz’s manga as they share a penchant for over-the-top storytelling that doesn’t concern itself with things like plot holes. I wasn’t that impressed with Orochi, Volume 1, which was a far from perfect manga full of bad writing and clunky storytelling - it’s not an amazing book but, if you’re interested in reading something from this creator, I recommend checking out Umezz’s slightly better later series, The Drifting Classroom, instead.
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