At only 4 pages long, I didn’t understand why it was included in this collection since it had no horror elements and didn’t make any sense.īy far my favorite story in Lovesickness was “The Rib Woman.” It involves a surgeon who offers surgery to remove womens’ ribs to give them a slimmer figure. It’s about a boy at a festival who wants to buy fake, rubber poop. The last story is called “Memories of Real Poop,” and as you can tell by the title, it was a strange one. “The Mansion of Phantom Pain” is another interesting tale about a boy who experiences pain from his own house, similar to amputees who feel pain in a phantom limb. 245).Īs for the other stories in the collection, the characters that stuck out most to me were the siblings from “The Strange Hikizuri Siblings.” Many of them had grotesque faces that reminded me of the Twilight Zone episode “The Masks.” Go ahead, look it up! In addition to their ugly appearances, the siblings all have intense, psychotic personalities that make them one of the most dysfunctional families I have ever seen in fiction. This page shows off the disturbed Hikizuri family ( Lovesickness, Pg. Still, the unfolding of the mystery and the discovery of Ryusuke’s connection to these misfortunes makes for a gripping read. One of the tropes I have noticed throughout many of his stories involve a young, attractive person who drives others into madness, and Lovesickness is no different. While an interesting concept, it does seem to get pretty repetitive as it continues to happen over the course of the story. In the titular story, fog enhances the gloomy atmosphere and is often followed by the appearance of the ghostly young man and the gruesome suicide of a woman he says will never find love. In true Junji Ito fashion, Lovesickness has a bleak narrative with disturbing artwork. Ryusuke has a dark secret he has hidden since his childhood that connects him with these disturbing new events, but I certainly won’t spoil that here. Unfortunately, encountering this young man turns out to become a bad omen since his fortunes often lead to women committing suicide, afraid that they will never find true love. On foggy nights, many young women encounter a mysterious young man with pierced ears and black clothes. The town has a tradition where people stand on street crossroads and ask the first passerby they see to tell their fortunes.

In Lovesickness, a young man named Ryusuke returns to the town he used to live in as a child. This story takes up more than half of the book, followed by a few shorter stories. I knew the story depicted on the front cover because it was an episode of the Junji Ito Collection anime. In thick fog, a girl turns on a street corner and encounters a creepy man ( Lovesickness, Pg.

Junji ito lovesickness