Mimi's Tales of Terror by Junji Ito Review

Mimi’s Tales of Terror is Junji Ito’s adaptation of Shin Mimibukuro (“New Earmuffs”) by Hirokatsu Kihara and Ichiro Nakayama which is a collection of “true” ghost stories. Though, as Ito explains in his afterword, he took more than a few liberties in adapting it - adding details, expanding stories, although he did it with the original authors’ consent - so it’s more like an interpretation of the original than a straight adaptation (but it’s unlikely anyone would know if he hadn’t mentioned this as the book is out of print!).

There wasn’t one great story among the 9 collected here. I liked the premise of Scarlet Circle, about a spooky secret room beneath a house with a red circle on the wall, a room where people enter it and disappear forever… Seashore isn’t bad. It’s about a haunted beach where some friends vacation and meet a pretty but somewhat-off local waitress. The final page is effective because Ito doesn’t show us the photograph but implies the weirdness - subtlety is at the heart of most great horror.

Unfortunately, Ito doesn’t apply this idea to any of the other stories so we explicitly see the horror and it comes off as silly and performative more than anything. We know immediately who the shadowy woman haunting the troubled kid in Just the Two of Us is while the conclusion of stories like The Woman Next Door or Monster Prop is the typical Ito-esque jump scare and nothing more. The two 4-page shorts, On the Utility Pole and Sign in the Field, are just creepy images rather than stories.

But the visuals are Ito’s usual high standard - there’s no complaints of sloppiness there. Mimi is the girl who appears in all of the stories (except for Monster Prop which is a bonus story added on at the end) as a kind of connecting thread and, in keeping with Ito’s “interpretation” of the source material, he made her much prettier than in the original. Ito reuses the same half dozen or so character designs throughout his work so she’s one of his recognisable attractive girl characters from previous books.

It was interesting to me to read the Kansai dialect in English. My mother’s side of the family is from that region (Kansai is the middle part of the biggest Japanese island where Kyoto/Osaka are located) and apparently, to Japanese ears, their accent is akin to the American south - I had no idea!

Mimi’s Tales of Terror is a well-drawn horror manga without any memorable stories. While none are so terrible as to make reading this book a bad experience, they’re still unimpressive. One of Junji Ito’s weaker collections.