After reading this I now fully understand the Junji Ito hype, because this was creepy as heck, y'all. Each girl appears to be a victim of an ill fortune received from the ghost when they asked him to weigh in on their love lives.

Lovesickness - The Comics Journal Lovesickness - The Comics Journal

The Beautiful Boy is similar to Itō’s siren Tomie — a stunning icon whose physical perfection leads admirers to violence and destruction. I was hooked waiting to see where he’d take the story, and it was mostly interesting, though, again the ending is weak.

Junji Ito is no stranger to depicting small Japanese towns that start off normally before spiraling into madness, chaos, mass destruction and death. If you're a Junji Ito fan, I highly recommend grabbing a copy of Lovesickness as soon as you can, because you're not going to want to miss this one! Unfortunately the main story also isn’t among the better parts of the collection but it’s a decent book overall. The Mansion of Phantom Pain” and “The Rib Woman” barely establish their supernatural conceits before they’re over; the spiral from normality to despair happens so fast you barely have time to feel vertiginous.

Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Collection - Waterstones

He doesn’t appear in ‘The Boy in White’, which is instead narrated by a man who comes to the city having heard rumours of its multiple suicides. Eight years prior to the story's events, Ryusuke met the pregnant aunt of his childhood friend Midori, who decided to get a crossroads fortune. With unhealthy idolization comes self-destructive behavior and the real harming of other human beings. Most of the family members have grotesque designs with the exception of 14-year-old Nanami, who instead appears attractive but constantly threatens to commit suicide to get what she wants from others.Soon after, rumors start spreading around Nazumi about Ryusuke being the bishounen in black, forcing him to go into hiding. The way Midori is written out of the story also feels arbitrary; as a character that was little more than the wingman for Ryūsuke's foggy excursions, I kept hoping for a little more nuance, but in the end she has little bearing on the story's outcome.

Official Manga Trailer | Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story Official Manga Trailer | Lovesickness: Junji Ito Story

Like many popular artists, Ito has a complex bibliography where the same or related short pieces appear in various volumes of different names. At the very least, Lovesickness is an original idea - I’ve never heard of hiding your face and asking strangers for fortunes - but it’s also a hella stupid one. Two standalone stories, ‘The Mansion of Phantom Pain’ and ‘The Rib Woman’, are the high point of the book. The imagery or the stories are never scary though - Ito’s horror is so absurdly over the top that it’s too silly to take seriously. The Mansion of Phantom Pain is also a decent story about a young man who gets a job at a rich person’s house where he has to relieve the man’s son’s pain that has somehow, invisibly filled the mansion.School becomes stressful the moment he starts finding love letters in his shoe cubby from obsessed girls. For example: A girl's hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head; Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other; a woman treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister's skin, etc.

Lovesickness | Junji Ito Wiki | Fandom

Begin creating individual pages for major Junji Ito Stories, expanding on the plot, characters, 'reveal panel', etc. The first is centred around a town in which people go to crossroads to ask people to tell them their fortune. He tells another to fall in love with her friend’s boyfriend, and she pursues him with desperate, hopeless obsession. The Hikizuri family are a group of weird nutters, almost like a Japanese Addams family, who, in the first story, decide to mess with their sister’s new boyfriend, and, in the second, the younger brother tries to usurp the older brother’s role as head of the family by faking a seance.

There follows a couple of linked black comedy stories following Narumi and her five super freaky siblings .