Moan is one of Junji Ito’s better horror manga collections. It still has the same problems of other Ito books - character motivations aren’t so much underdeveloped as ignored and the endings are bonkers and often abrupt, while the shortest stories, included at the end almost like B-sides, are always the most forgettable - but the stories here are more entertaining than in others.
The collection starts strongly with Supernatural Transfer Student where a new kid moves to town and weird stuff starts happening. Eyeball flowers, a waterfall - that somehow gives magic powers - appears that wasn’t there before, a lake with a Godzilla-esque monster! No idea what the kid was, how he was doing all of this, or to what end, but the story is unpredictable, imaginative and always entertaining, even with the absurd ending.
Moan is my favourite story here. A mother and her two teenage daughters are clean freaks, constantly bathing and living in a thoroughly-scrubbed house. But, after turning away a young man who doesn’t meet their cleanliness standards, the pipes of their house start clogging, threatening the hygiene of the place - and then there begins a strange moaning from deep within the house’s plumbing…
Giving the main characters traits that make them unreasonable and unlikeable is an interesting choice and I liked seeing how dirt made its way into the house a la Poe’s The Masque of Red Death. It’s not clear why the mother and daughters became so obsessive, or their dad’s actions later in the story, which is why I say Ito’s writing is underdeveloped, leading to plot points that are wholly contrived.
And yet I was totally hooked and well into Moan to the point that I didn’t mind the incongruous “explanation” of a certain character’s fate in being the source of the moaning and the impossible finale. Junji Ito had a vision and he followed through on it, details be damned!
Those were the standout stories, which also happened to be the first two, and from that point on the succeeding stories became less impressive, unfortunately.
Blood Orb Grove has a great premise where a couple stranded in the countryside encounter a creepy man living alone in an abandoned village. It’s a unique new twist on vampires and has Ito’s most detailed splash page he’s done to date. But, Ito doesn’t do much else on the same level with the vampire angle and it plays out fairly predictably and mundanely.
Flesh-Colored Mystery is about a kindergarten teacher who gets a bucket of crap thrown over her and somehow it’s connected to the disturbed kid in her class and his love of tearing down pictures and wallpaper. Then she finds out his home situation with a beautiful aunt and an always-wet mother and then we’re into some gross body horror. The story was underwritten to the point where it became unignorable - certain scenes didn’t quite tie-in with others - and the different elements failed to draw me in like the other stories had. It’s a mystery all right but not an especially compelling one.
The book closes out with the two shortest stories here. Near Miss is about a phantom plane that appears after an accident and Under the Ground is about a spooky time capsule. They’re the two least engaging stories here but at least they’re very short so they’re over the quickest - a pair of instantly forgettable and obvious closers.
Supernatural Transfer Student and Moan are two good stories out of the six but they also make up half the book in their length with two of the four lesser stories being very short comparably. So I think it evens out to a pretty decent - for Junji Ito - collection.
Ito’s definitely not the strongest writer and his storytelling is sometimes quite sloppy - I wonder if he weren’t so productive in cranking out such a high volume of books, if this wouldn’t lead to better quality manga - but he’s also a helluva cartoonist and an undeniably talented artist with a unique look to his stories. And, by far his best quality, is his creativity - the stories don’t always work but he’s a true original and it’s rare to read a Junji Ito comic and consider it derivative of anyone else’s work, because nobody does horror manga quite like him.
Moan, like Shiver, Lovesickness and Frankenstein, is among Ito’s better collections and definitely worth checking out if you’re in the mood for some fun and very unusual horror manga.
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