Soichi is an antisocial little boy who likes putting nails in his mouth and hammering them into voodoo dolls of people to cause them pain. Why does his family put up with this kind of behaviour? Because there’d be no book otherwise! How is he able to make voodoo dolls, or any of his other spells, work? No idea - he just can. Just consume and move on - thinking is for suckers!
Soichi is where Junji Ito jumps the shark. He’s either doing two things in this book: parodying himself, or doing unfunny horror comedy. Because the other thing he could be doing - straight horror, like most of his output - isn’t the least bit scary, and his work is now so over-the-top that it’s become an unintentional parody of what people expect a Junji Ito horror manga to be, or he’s just being silly for the sake of it.
It was the life-size dolls wandering around scaring people that made me wonder if this was meant to be a comedy. Why would anyone mistake a badly-made doll of a teacher to be the actual teacher otherwise? One of them literally has half their head torn off and the stuffing coming out! Or the scene where a giant spider toilet papers a kid.
Soichi’s powers are whatever the story calls for in the moment. He needs to grow tentacles out of his face? He needs to somehow create a giant articulated spider costume? He needs to bring the dead back to life? He needs a handyman to create a bizarre labyrinthine room to infuriate his brother? He needs to bring life-size dolls to life and move around? He needs to curse various people for various things? Done and done. Ito doesn’t even attempt to try and explain how Soichi is doing any of it.
The problem with magic is that if you can do anything in a story without definition or limitations, then it’s boring. Especially when there are no stakes and the stories become repetitive. Soichi does something nasty, people struggle against it, they might overcome it or not, it doesn’t matter because the story ends and Soichi faces zero consequences for his actions; repeat.
Although having said that, the grotesque model from Ito’s Shiver collection makes a cameo in the final story to maybe deliver Soichi his comeuppance, but I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing comes of it and Soichi appears in any other stories Ito wants to make featuring him without reference to this.
The design of the four-layered room is clever and Ito’s art overall is his usual high standard, but the stories in this collection are too flimsily-constructed and idiotic to be at all compelling. Soichi is a collection of pseudo-horror stories that are so nonsensical and absurd that it comes off as a pastiche of horror more than anything.
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