Stitches Review (Hirokatsu Kihara, Junji Ito)

Stitches is NOT a manga.

To interested readers seeing this book online and not being able to physically open the book up (which I suspect make up a fair number), this is worth noting as I’m sure Junji Ito’s fans will see his name and art on the cover, from his usual manga publisher, and buy it based on that… only to find it’s a book of mostly prose short stories by Hirokatsu Kihara, with accompanying art from Junji Ito, and only a single short manga by Ito at the end. Which would be understandably disappointing, not least as the short stories suuuuuck!

If the other name is familiar it’s because Ito adapted Kihara’s book Shin Mimibukuro into a manga that was recently published, Mimi’s Tales of Terror. In Stitches, we get to experience Kihara’s (translated into English) prose and stories firsthand, and, boy, is he a terrible writer.

There are nine stories here, not really “stitched” together in any noticeable sense besides all being astoundingly bad. Here are some examples of the kind of stories to expect. Some bored teenagers see lights in the sky on a beach - that’s one story. A ghost plays with a puppet - until it doesn’t. That’s another story. A weird face appears on a woman’s neck so a priest heals her and she’s fine - that’s another story. Someone sees a ghost girl running in a library so a priest does some mumbo jumbo and the ghost is gone - that’s another story.

They’re so bafflingly simplistic it’s amazing that anyone thought these were good enough to publish. The stories are uniformly predictable, uninteresting, not at all scary, unimaginative, and come across as childish in how basic their structure is. The characters are appropriately not named but have letters instead - T said, S looked, etc. - which only emphasises how characterless they are.

Ito’s short manga that closes out the book is actually pretty decent but no way is it worth buying this one to read just that (unless you can get it from the library). No idea what Junji Ito sees in Kihara’s laughably empty stories to keep collaborating with him but I didn’t get anything out of reading Stitches - awful stuff.