Tombs by Junji Ito Review

A spooky village riddled with tombstones. A monster washed up on a beach. A girl with a slug for a tongue. A haunted tunnel/statues/house/town/everything. So your average Junji Ito story collection? Yuh huh!

Tombs is Junji Ito’s latest horror manga collection but it’s not among his better efforts. The stories are less like stories and more like a striking image or idea with a lot of fluff surrounding them, a bit like a nightmare that you only half-remember. And, like nightmares, there isn’t any sense around the explanations - stuff happens for the sake of weirdness/horror.

So, like Tombs and The Bloody Story of Shirosuna, there’s no reasoning behind why the villages are the way they are - they just are because horror story. You get some creepy atmosphere and the occasional wonderfully surreal image but not much else, so it’s not the most satisfying of reads.

Others, like Clubhouse and Washed Ashore, are more like half-baked ideas. Clubhouse is about a house haunted by two rival political factions and the schoolgirl who gets caught between the two. Washed Ashore is about a sea monster that’s washed ashore and people find things within its body. Those are both the premise and the entirety of the stories!

I found a couple of the stories less scary (to be fair I rarely find Ito’s manga genuinely scary) and more comedic. Like the imagery in Slug Girl - particularly that final page - and The Window Next Door of the absurd woman sitting in the window opposite this poor kid’s room.

Bronze Statue comes off as over-the-top fairy tale-style storytelling where a gross rich old woman becomes obsessed with statues and uses her wealth to spy on people in the park. It goes to some really bonkers places after that with, again, no explanations for why certain things happen. It’s unpredictable and original at least, which goes for most of the stories here.

Floaters felt derivative of that terrible Tom Holland movie Chaos Walking, where people can see their thoughts manifest as these floating thingies. The Strange Tale of the Tunnel was too contrived - a group of scientists studying a natural cosmic phenomenon that happens to mimic the ghosts’ behaviour in that tunnel? It’s a bit of a stretch. The preamble surrounding it is slightly interesting but doesn’t really go anywhere or make much sense. It also has a very underwhelming and abrupt ending, something that’s a constant feature not just in this book but in most of Ito’s stories.

Tombs is indicative of a lot of Junji Ito’s manga collections in that it’s full of unique story ideas and imagery wrapped up in clunky storytelling and weak writing that often undermines the horror it’s shooting for. This one isn’t among Ito’s most memorable or exciting books and I felt a lot of the stories to be rushed and unengaging. If you’re after one of his better collections, check out Shiver or Frankenstein instead.