Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection - TV Tropes (2024)

Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection - TV Tropes (1)

The first and longest anthology serial of horror master Junji Ito's work. Totaling 16 volumes and including several subseries among the short stories, the collection's most notable contributions may be that it featured the first collection of his famous Tomie series and that it introduced many unconnected and wildly varied one-shot stories that defined Ito's range.

In addition to the Tomie stories, the manga includes the short Lovesickness series and multiple stories about Souichi, a creepy brat who partakes in supernatural mischief; Oshikiri, a boy with a height complex and several run-ins with parallel dimensions; the Strange Hikizuri Siblings, a creepy yet amusingly dysfunctional family unit; and finally, Ito's own take on Frankenstein.

The manga has also been published under the name Museum of Terror, with the difference being the order of some of the stories.

Though they were included here, tropes from Tomie and Lovesickness should go on the two series' own pages. Tropes about the Frankenstein adaptation and the Oshikiri stories should go to Frankenstein (Junji Ito).

An anime adaptation of a select number of chapters by Studio DEEN, simply called The Junji Ito Collection, was released in 2018. Consisting of 25 stories over 12 Two Shorts format episodes and a two-part OVA. Reception was generally mixed, largely due to the conversion being far less scary in addition to being noticeably low-budget with simplified backgrounds and character design and limited animation.

The anthology would then receive another anime adaptation in the form of Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre, released on Netflix on January 19, 2023.

Provides examples of:

  • Adults Dressed as Children: Used to horrifying effect at the end of "Bullied", when the protagonist regresses into the pattern of abusive behavior she displayed in her childhood and dons her outgrown schoolgirl outfit and ties her hair in Girlish Pigtails in a grotesque copy of her look at that age.
  • Alas, Poor Villain: Mr. Todoh in "A Father's Love" possesses his children's bodies against their will, tries to get his daughter to kill herself and almost kills a boy who had pursued her romantically — but admits that he just wanted to be young and have fun again by living through them, as he missed out on his own youth due to being forced to work as a child.
  • Ambiguous Time Period: Aside from those that specifically mention it, like "Deserter" (1953), it's frequently difficult to tell when any particular story takes place, giving them a weirdly timeless feeling. Even those that give suggestions to when the events are taking place — such as Dying Young, which mentions the impending turn of the century, thus setting it during the 1990s — tend to avoid giving a specific year, allowing for a great deal of interpretation.
  • And I Must Scream: "The Bronze Statue" ends with Sonobe, having killed herself so that Tsuchiya could transmute her soul into into an immortal and beautiful gold statue, trapped inside the plaster mould forever when Tsuchiya dies mid-way through the smelting process due to his bad lungs finally checking up to him.
  • Bad Humor Truck: In "Ice Cream Bus", the bus looks normal, and the driver is a typical handsome Bishōnen, but it lures children away and slowly transforms them into ice cream, which/who they eat as they transform into ice cream.
  • Barred from the Afterlife: In "The Bridge", this happens to the dead who are sent down the river in a funeral ritual and fall into the water instead of passing successfully underneath the town bridge downstream.
  • Bedtime Brainwashing: Featured in "The Gift-Bearer" and "The Town Without Streets".
  • Bee-Bee Gun: The boy in "Beehive" who can control wasps and uses them to fend off hive robbers. Then, after the boy is killed and buried, they make a hive around the boy's head and start tending to him.
  • Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Strange Hikizuri Siblings. They're like an abusive Addams Family.
  • Bittersweet Ending:
    • "The Back Alley". Shinobu kills Ishida but becomes trapped in the alley and is left helpless as the ghosts of her victims come out for revenge.
    • "Marionette Mansion". Haruhiko saves his sister and destroys Jean-Pierre but his girlfriend is killed and it's revealed that Yukihiko and his family have become marionettes.
    • "Shiver". Yuji witnesses Hideo succumb to the curse of the jade statue, being warned by him that the doctor is really a servant. Hideo's body is later found with the statue missing, but Rina seems to be finally free from the curse with her body apparently back to normal.
  • Bizarrchitecture: "The Town Without Streets" takes place in a town with buildings that grow together to the point that the streets are gone and people need to move through the buildings to get around. Any damage done to the buildings regenerates within a day.
  • Body Horror:
    • The transformations in "The Hell of the Doll Funeral" go From Bad to Worse to say the absolute least.
    • Chikara's mother in "Flesh-Colored Horror" thinks people are more beautiful alive and sans skin, and has developed a chemical process to make such a thing possible.
  • Came Back Wrong: Souichi's grandfather in "Coffin" and Shibayama in "The Supernatural Transfer Student".
  • Cessation of Existence: In "The Long Dream", the terminally ill girl Mami is terrified of this imminently happening to her. She is ultimately saved from this fate by being "treated" with the crystals from Mukoda's corpse, possibly allowing her to enter a state of eternal existence in dreams.
  • Circus of Fear: In "The Circus is Here", many people, mostly young men, flock to the Papyrus Circus to see its beautiful tight rope walker Leiliya. But during the show, all the performers are killed in brutal ways during their acts, then they are unceremoniously dragged off the stage like trash on the ringmaster's orders. Eventually, Leiliya reveals that the ringmaster is actually a Shinigami who uses her as bait to lure unsuspecting people to the Circus so that they can die and he can reap their souls. The audience is horrified but can't bring themselves to leave as they're too entranced by Leiliya's beauty. Once all the performers are dead, the ringmaster gleefully asks for volunteers from the audience to join and replace those he lost, offering Leiliya's hand in marriage as a prize. The story ends with the protagonist's younger sister running home crying to their mother that he took the ringmaster's offer.
  • City of Adventure: Deconstructed in "The Supernatural Transfer Student". While the Supernatural Club was trying to find interesting new things in their ordinary town, it turns out it's downright disturbing (and potentially fatal) to constantly have bizarre new things turning up around every corner.
  • Clothes Make the Maniac: The titular object in "The Reanimator's Sword" always possesses its owner and makes them carry out its will, including Keiji after he acquires it.
  • Compelling Voice: Ms. Yokoi, in "The Devil's Logic", seems to use this to convince people to commit suicide.
  • Cosmetic Horror: "Flesh-Colored Horror" has a woman obsessed with beauty (a common theme in Ito's work). This one, however, thinks that naked muscles are prettier and peels off her skin when at home.
  • Creepy Doll: In "The Hell of the Doll Funeral", this is taken to a horrifying extreme. The daughter of the protagonist, Marie, is afflicted with a disease that first turns her into a doll, then into something more disturbing for its passing resemblance to a human being.
  • Creepy Twins: "Souichi's Birthday" gives Souichi an equally terrifying twin (whether a ghost or a conjured figment of his imagination isn't clear).
  • Daddy's Girl: Miho in "A Father's Love" is one until her father starts turning against her. Also Mizusu from "Approval", whose father lies and uses a man for years just to be able to see her spirit.
  • Dead All Along:
    • In "Deserter", a family hides a war deserter and keeps him there years after the war's end, pretending the war is still on since they blame him for their sister's death during his initial stay. The grudge the family feels means that every day, they fool the deserter into thinking World War II is still taking place, even enlisting a family friend to dress as a military police officer to keep up the facade. On one evening, several years into the masquerade, they discover that he hanged himself only two days after the girl died, leaving them shaken at the question of what had really been happening.
    • In "Mold", the protagonist finds his house becoming rapidly overrun by the fungus after letting his old science teacher's family rent it. In a room that was sealed by mold-induced warping before the door rotted off, he discovers that the family, who introduced the mold, never left the house, having been consumed by it and dying some time before he returned home.
  • Disability Immunity: Yukari in "Village the Siren" deafened herself so she could no longer be affected by the siren.
  • Disability Superpower: Because of a rare blood disorder, Souichi must have a constant supply of iron to live. He achieves this by chewing on carpenter's nails, which he also sticks between his teeth to bite people with, spits at enemies and hammers into voodoo dolls. "Souichi's Birthday" implies that he used his curses to bring the condition upon himself. He didn't have it as a young child, and got his habit of carrying things in his mouth from his grandmother, who always had a toothpick in her mouth.
  • The Dog Bites Back:
    • Chikara from "Flesh-Colored Horror" gets back at his psychopathic mother who subjected him to horrifying experiments by dissolving her removed skin (which she wears like a suit) with acid. When his mother attacks his aunt and condemns the latter to a similar slow death as the former, as she also has removable skin, he tears apart his mother's leg muscles, dooming her to eventually mummify.
    • In one of the "Strange Hikizuri Siblings" stories, the badly abused and mistreated Hitoshi manages to get back at his siblings by summoning the terrifying ectoplasmic form of their father from his mouth. He's completely oblivious.
  • Dying Curse: The plot of "The Will" is based around this, with two vengeful spirits haunting out of hatred. Neither ghost had the right house, and neither knew the other was dead.
  • Easy Amnesia: Risa from "Honored Ancestors" suffers from this, having abruptly suffered complete amnesia for seemingly no reason. It's revealed that the shock from discovering the truth about her boyfriend's father caused her mind to erase all memory out of sheer horror. The old man has his head connected to a long line of human scalps, with the still living brains of the family's ancestors attached resembling a giant caterpillar. And the boyfriend wants to marry her so he can continue the family line... She also suffers amnesiac breaks from this two more times over the course of the story.
  • Eldritch Location: In "Ryokan", the hot spring inside the inn seems to be a literal portal to Hell.
  • Evil-Detecting Dog: In "Mold", Akasaka remembers that he was wary of the Rogi family renting his house because his dog growled at them while they were in his house.
  • Eye Scream: In "The Town Without Streets", Saiko sees a peephole being made in her ceiling... and shoves a screwdriver up it. The next morning, her father is sporting an eyepatch.
  • The Faceless:
    • In "Used Record", Paula Bell's face is never seen.
    • Kamei from "Face Thief" doesn't have a face of her own anymore, as she automatically changes to copy faces she's seen. She thinks the only way to revert to her original face is to live in complete isolation, since simply being near other people affects her face. We never get to see what she actually looks like.
  • Facial Horror: At the end of "Face Thief", Kamei's gambit is exposed, and as a result, she is confronted with a mass of students wearing grotesque masks. Their plan works, and her face starts uncontrollably shifting to look like all of them at once.
  • Faking the Dead: Kojima in "Bog of Living Spirits" attempts to do this in order to escape the obsessive throng of female classmates who won't leave him alone. It remains unclear by the end of the story whether the faked death was more real than he planned.
  • Family Relationship Switcheroo: In "The Will", the protagonist's "sister" turns out to be her cousin, who was adopted by Hiroko's parents as a baby.
  • Festering Fungus: In "Mold", the protagonist finds his house becoming rapidly overrun by a strange fungus after letting his old science teacher's family rent it. As it turns out, said science teacher had a passion for mycology, and created a super-fungus that eventually killed, then consumed him and his family some time before the protagonist returned home. Shortly after finding their bodies in a room that was sealed by mold-induced warping before the door rotted off, the protagonist is trapped by and eventually succumbs to the mold as well.
  • Flaying Alive: "Flesh-Colored Horror" centers around an elementary school teacher being concerned for the wellbeing of one of her students, who has mysterious damage to his skin and has a habit of peeling away pictures tacked to the wall. She eventually discovers that the boy's father discovered a formula that let one peel off their skin like a suit, allowing them to walk around without it. He died out of the horror of his discovery. The boy's mother decided that a skinless body is absolutely beautiful and did it to herself, keeping her own skin in a tank of water and only wearing it every so often so she wouldn't dry out. She had been trying to perform the same process on her son, but her sister kept sabotaging it so that the formula was strong enough to damage the boy's skin but not strip it off. When the climactic fight causes the mother's skin to be destroyed, she rips off her sister's skin in an attempt to steal it for herself.
  • Fold-Spindle Mutilation: "The Groaning Drain" has this happen to Shinri when something pulls her into a drainpipe over the course of several hours. In this case, the aftermath is never seen, but she is apparently still alive for some given meaning of the word.
  • Foreshadowing: The creepy woman's house in "The Window Next Door" has some cracks on it, particularly around its only window. When we see her terrifying last resort, it then seems as if she's pulled that trick before, and the cracks are from the deformation and reversion of the house's structure, i.e., the window has been stretched out and settled back in before.
  • Formula-Breaking Episode: "Bullied" has no overtly supernatural elements, no gore or deaths, and very few outright Nightmare Face moments. It's more or less grounded in reality in comparison to most of his stories, but that doesn't make its ending any less disturbing.
  • The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You:
    • The ending of "Ice Cream Bus" in the 2023 anime has one of the titular bus's eyes turn directly towards the camera before it cuts to black.
    • It happens again in "Long Hair in the Attic", with Chiemi's hair covering the "camera" at the end of the episode.
  • The Friend Nobody Likes: Souichi is an interesting case of this. While he evidently has no real friends and is an outcast among his classmates, no one ever really seems to bear him any ill will no matter how sinister he's been. Ishizaka, the classmate Souichi believed was going through a roughpatch with his friend, was relatively tolerant of Souichi's pestering, only snapping at him after Souichi consistently doesn't get the hint. Even Midori, who was one of the bigger and more consistent victims of Souichi's harrassment, still took the time to hope he's okay after their run-in with Fuchi, despite the fact that he had just been taking sexually explicit, comprising, and potentially illegal photos of her in her underwear. It seems that, like his family, Souichi's classmates don't actively hate him so much as they see him as a nuisance not worth their time.
  • Gaslighting: Sakai's family in "Town Without Streets" does this to her — of course, she catches on quickly, and her family keeps on trying to gaslight her.
  • Genuine Human Hide: "Flesh-Colored Horror" doesn't need a killer to fuel a nightmare. Some years ago, a man tried to create the perfect skin lotion, but ended up creating a cocktail that separates the skin from the muscles underneath. He died of fright, but his wife, Kawabe, became obsessed with the "inner beauty" and applied the lotion. Her skin she fashioned into a suit with a zipper on the back, because she still needed it to prevent her muscles and organs from drying out. The suit itself also needed to be kept hydrated, but that was a small price to pay. Then she got the idea to spread her sense of beauty and first tricked her sister, Maya, into undergoing the treatment. Thereafter, she wanted to help her son, Chikara, but Maya secretly repeatedly switched out the acid with water to protect her nephew. When Kawabe finds out, Chikara makes a stand and pours acid over his mother's skin suit, destroying it. Kawabe, in turn, demands Maya's skin and rips her face off, dooming them both.
  • The Glorious War of Sisterly Rivalry: In "The Will", the two sisters get along horribly, with one deliberately disturbing the other's studies before being shut down. They aren't really sisters, but they were raised as such, and the trope is played as if they were sisters.
  • Halfway Plot Switch: While a lack of privacy fuels the horror of the entire story, "The Town Without Streets" has distinctly different plots in its first and second halves. It begins with a girl's dreams being influenced by a shy lovestruck boy coming into her room to whisper suggestions to her for attention, before he gets murdered. As a result of the boy's intrusions, the girl's family starts persistently spying on her in disturbing ways, yet denies all peeping beyond reason, so she goes off to live with her aunt. The second half of the story deals with the strange town the aunt lives in, where everything is accessed by a maze of recently built-together houses, and all attempts at being alone are futile while more unnatural watchers peep in. The murderer comes back, though.
  • Hellgate: In "Ryokan", Mitosuyo's father has an unnatural obsession with turning his house into an inn with a hot spring, digging a very deep pit into the ground to find one, and proclaims his success. However, it's not water that pools into the pit, but rather hot blood; Mitosuyo's father has managed to somehow dig a hole into the Underworld itself. He never gets any guests either, only demons and a few oni and yokai emerging from the pit.
  • Help, I'm Stuck!: This happens to the protagonist of "Clubhouse", getting her head stuck in a board dividing the titular structure. Unfortunately for her, her only available help is two rival clubs who divided the house and who are each eager to pull her out over to their side to recruit her.
  • Hitodama Light: In "Bog of Living Spirits", these are seen around the bog where someone may have recently died. It turns out these are the spirits of two obsessive girls hoping that he, their fellow classmate, is still alive, and waiting for him to surface again.
  • Hive Mind:
    • A subversion in "Honored Ancestors". Risa's amnesia was caused by her seeing the scalps and brains of every member of Shuichi's family grafted to his father's head. The end shows that, rather than just the person at the end inheriting their collected knowledge, each one can still actively think.
    • This is a significant plot point in "The Conversation Room". The patients in a hospital ward are of one mind and assimilate through masses of needled tubes coming from their mouths.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • Souichi, in almost every story.
    • In "Back Alley", the girl whom Ishida was staying with turns out to have killed many of her classmates, burying them in the alley. At the end, she becomes trapped there and their ghosts advance on her.
    • "Used Record" is about a record of a postmortem performance that supernaturally compels people to listen to it, to the point of killing others to get it. At the beginning of the story, one of its victims kills her friend to get it from her — and later dies herself when she is blockaded into an alleyway because she'd stashed her friend's body there.
    • "Scripted Love": A playboy makes a videotape for his girlfriend so that she won't feel bad after he dumps her. When he tries to break up with her, she stabs him in a frenzy, and then finds the tape he made for her. Unfortunately, she decides she prefers the tape to the real him, and finishes him off with a broken bottle rather than saving his life.
    • "Map Town": A couple are in a town where everyone magically loses the ability to navigate, forcing them to rely on maps everywhere. The husband is the only one unaffected by the curse. Later, he and his wife go looking for treasure and plunder an urn filled with gold Koban coins. As expected, the townspeople are not impressed, and try to apprehend them. In an attempt to lose the townspeople, the duo scribble over as many maps as they can. To the husband's horror, he discovers that the curse has hit him, as well, leaving the couple unable to find their way out of the town. It's possible that the villagers could clean the maps, too, and they would find the thieves eventually...
    • "Bronze Statue": A vain woman commissions several statues of herself from her ex-lover, a sculptor. She also has him kill the neighboring women who gossiped about her, by encasing them in concrete. After discovering that the body of her husband, whom she murdered, has turned into wax from being buried in a swamp and having it carved into a statue cast, she comes up with a plan to drown herself in the swamp and have the sculptor retrieve her and turn her into the most beautiful statue ever seen. Unfortunately, he dies just as he is about to fill the mold with molten gold. Her conscious spirit remains trapped inside the mold in the cellar forever.
    • In "Mold", the titular super-fungus is revealed to have destroyed the Rogi family who brought it into existence.
  • Humanoid Abomination:
    • The doctor from "Shiver" is also revealed to be one that has to do with the jade carving's curse.
    • Fuchi, too, considering that she's some sort of horrifying demon-lady but still acts very human (that's not to say she acts like a good human) and looks relatively close to one. She even has incomprehensible success as a fashion model.
    • The neighbor in "The Window Next Door" is clearly something pretending to be human, judging by the gaudy jewelry, misapplied false eyelashes, and perfect hair that can only be a wig. Also, she has some unnerving ability to warp her house's structure closer to her neighbor's window.
  • I'm a Humanitarian: Fuchi in "Fashion Model" turns out to be more than just a scary face.
  • Important Haircut: Defied by the hair itself in "The Long Hair in the Attic" when Chiemi is encouraged to cut her hair because it symbolized the control her recent ex had over her, as he had made her grow it out. The cut gets made a little lower than the hair instead.
  • Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Souichi is genuinely nasty, mean-spirited, and all-around evil, but he's so bad at it that it's hard not to feel sorry for him all the same.
  • Involuntary Shapeshifting: "Face Thief" takes this trope and dives headfirst into a pool of Nightmare Fuel with it. Kamei is a high-school student that, with enough contact with someone, will eventually assume their form. Eventually, the students all don Youkai masks and surround her, taunting her while she screams in pain and mutates. The end result is not pretty.
  • Ironic Name: The town in "Map Town" is named Shirube, which is noted by the husband character to be a good sign, as it means "guide". Unfortunately, Shirube is likely to be called that because its residents require excessive guidance, as it exerts an influence that completely cripples anyone's sense of direction.
  • It Came from the Sink: In "The Groaning Drain", sisters Reina and Shinri and their cleaning-obsessed mother are at first only mildly annoyed when their drains start to clog. Reina is more concerned that her Abhorrent Admirer Kari now knows where she lives (thanks to Shinri leading him to their house so their mother could insult him). Then the drains begin to leak a foul smell, and their pipes begin to moan. Shinri becomes convinced that Kari is causing the trouble, having crawled into their pipes to stalk them. Reina tells her that's ridiculous, as their pipes aren't more than a few centimeters wide, but it turns out that Shinri is right — Kari is in their pipes, having crushed his bones and deformed his skull to crawl into their drains. When Reina forces Shinri's hand into the shower drain to prove that there's nothing in there, Shinri is dragged into the pipes inch by inch as a shell-shocked Reina watches in disbelief.
  • It's Been Done: Meta-example. In author commentary for "Honored Ancestors", Ito notes his pride in the imagery of Shuichi Makita running on all fours while on his back and attached to the scalps of his ancestors... and his disappointment that The Exorcist's director's cut included the spider-walking scene and beat him to it.
  • It's Raining Men: "Falling" is about a mysterious phenomenon calling people into the sky before they are brutally dropped back down to earth. We are never told what is pulling the people into the air, but from what we hear from the protagonist's girlfriend, restrained on the ground, all who are called into the air meet unspeakable horrors.
  • I Was Quite a Looker: In "Bronze Statue", a statue of a beautiful young woman is installed in the local park. The one who commissioned it, an ugly old widow named Mrs. Sonobe, says it was made to look like her younger self, but nobody believes that she actually looked like that.
  • "Join Us" Drone: In "The Conversation Room", a group of female patients have been assimilated into a single connected being, unknown to the hospital staff. They creepily urge another patient, Sugie, to join them in their room, before later assimilating her.
  • Lighter and Softer: Several of the stories are more melancholy than disturbing, and some, like the Souichi stories, are more comedic.
  • Living Gasbag: "The Hanging Balloons" features a very odd take on this trope. Giant living balloons, each one bearing the likeness of a specific person's face, suddenly appear all over the world, hunting down the people they look like and strangling them with their strings. The balloons are easy enough to destroy, but doing so kills the person they are "connected" to as well.
  • Living Statue:
    • In "Headless Statues", an art teacher sculpts figures without heads to place greater emphasis on body language's power of expression. Then the statues come to life and kill people to take their victims' heads for their own.
    • Subverted in several ways in "Bronze Statue". Mrs. Sonobe, an ugly and rich widow, commissions beautiful sculptures which apparently reflect herself and her husband in their youth, though nobody buys it. She puts microphones and cameras into them to see what people are saying to her and talk from them, invoking this idea, and she later starts to see the sculptures come to life and mock her. This is implied to be nervous hallucination, but also might be because one of the supposedly living sculptures was molded from the waxified, reshaped corpse of her husband. When she goes under this preservation to be turned into a sculpture, her spirit is stuck inside the unfinished form.
  • Looks Worth Killing For: "Flesh-Colored Horror" has Chikara's mother and her macabre sense of beauty that she tries to inflict on her son. Her husband, now deceased, created a serum that causes the flesh to cleanly separate from the muscle and she becomes obsessed with this "perfect" new aesthetic. She tricks her sister into using the serum and then demands they treat Chikara as well. While his aunt sabotaged the formula to protect him, he's still regularly subjected to the grueling treatment process, turning the boy into a sullen, violent, diseased-looking wreck. The removable skin must be treated with brine to stay fresh, and it must be worn like a jumpsuit to prevent damage to the muscle.
  • Love Before First Sight: Souichi for Fuchi, after seeing her in a magazine in "Rumors", if the dream-future with Binzo Tsujii is to be believed.
  • The Maze: "Unbearable Labyrinth" features one used by a monastic order who entomb themselves alive within it in an eternal meditation.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Many of Souichi's stories are rife with this. Whether Souichi actually has dark powers, or if all of his "curses" are actually just pranks is up to interpretation. Several of his curses are shown to have mundane explanations to them, though others, such as Ootsuki experiencing random stomach pains right when Souichi is piercing his voodoo doll, seem to imply Souichi does have at least some legitimate magical powers to speak of.
  • Mistaken for Disease: In "Shiver", characters suffer inexplicable chills that are initially misdiagnosed as mundane illness. However, it turns out this is actually a precursor to holes opening up across the skin of the victims; contrary to the suspicions of the doctors, is not a disease, but the result of a cursed jade statuette passed from victim to victim.
  • Mortality Phobia: Mami in "The Long Dream" is terrified of death, and wakes up screaming almost every night. This isn't helped when Mukoda, a patient having abnormally long dreams, starts to transform as the dreams become longer, confuses his dreams and reality and goes to Mami's room, as they were married in a dream of his. She mistakes him for Death coming to take her soul until the doctors calm her down. Ultimately, Mukoda dies in his dream and crumbles apart, leaving only a strange crystalline substance behind where his brain was. The doctors discuss how Mami's condition has improved, but she's started having long dreams as well, as the crystals were administered to her. Now, she can live in an apparent infinity due to the dreams, but it's still quite disturbing.
  • Morton's Fork: "The Hanging Balloons" has one of those concerning the titular balloons, which are huge, flying, shaped like a person's head, and dead set on killing their look-alike by hanging them with the steel cable that serves as their balloon string. Either one gets caught and hanged to death, or someone fighting back pops/deflates someone's balloon — which isn't any better, as that will cause the balloon's look-alike's head to also pop/deflate.
  • Murderous Mannequin: In "Headless Statues", an artist makes headless mannequins because he wants people to appreciate the body language, not the face. Then his creations come to life, kill whoever they can, and place the victims' heads on their necks.
  • Never Mess with Granny: Souichi's grandmother, who appears once a year on his birthday and does not take kindly to anyone upsetting her beloved grandson.
  • Never Sleep Again: "Where the Sandman Lives" has this concerning an internal threat; that of a second self emerging from within you and turning you inside out like a reversible plush once you fall asleep.
  • New Media Are Evil: "The Town Without Streets" is a pretty blatant parable about the dangers of the internet.
  • New Transfer Student: The title character of "The Supernatural Transfer Student" is one, and he seems to bring horror with him into the town.
  • Nightmare Face:
    • Fuchi, whose face is one in-universe for the protagonist of "Fashion Model". After seeing her in a magazine, her unsettlingly long, gaunt face haunts him more and more...and that's before her teeth are shown.
    • "The Window Next Door". Hello, neighbor...
  • No Ending: A number of stories simply end in the middle of the climax without any resolution or explanation why the scary thing is happening. At worst, the main character will be facing Uncertain Doom.
  • No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The titular "Used Record" is one of few in existence, because it captured the singer's last moments, as well as her singing after she died. Anyone who does acquire the record is compelled to listen to it and not share.
  • No Sense of Direction: In "Map Town", the entire town of Shirube is cursed so its inhabitants have no sense of direction and are forced to rely on excessively provided maps and signposts.
  • Not Evil, Just Misunderstood:
    • The father in "Approval" cruelly and repeatedly denies the hand of his daughter to a suitor because his daughter is actually dead, and the unaware suitor asking for his permission to marry is the only way that he can see his daughter's spirit.
    • An interpretation of the lady in "The Window Next Door" is that she's genuinely attempting to be friendly with her new neighbor, but as a result of her Humanoid Abomination characteristics and privacy-violating behavior it comes across that she has much worse intent than she actually does.
  • Nothing Is Scarier: The protagonist of "Face Firmly in Place" ends up locked in a surgical chair that holds her in via spikes that enter her ear canals. We see her at the end telling her story, her hair grown out and hiding her ears, and she waves off the experience, claiming she was found and rescued the next day. However, she flips out when the man she's talking to tries to see her ears, leaving it unclear what kind of horrific damage she may have suffered.
  • Older Than They Look: In "Face Thief", Kamei is a shapeshifting schoolgirl who involuntarily takes the appearance of anyone she spends time around. It is stated at the end of the story that she is not really a student and has been attending the school without permission, but no one knows how to get rid of her. They believe she is far older than she really appears.
  • Our Vampires Are Different:
    • "Bio House" features a vampiric epicurean and his servants, who try to feast on his guest's blood.
    • "The Bloody Story of Shirosuna" features something like vampiric land, as the town is powered by a giant subterranean heart which pumps blood in and out of its citizens and can take over circulation for new members of the town.
    • "Blood-Bubble Bushes" has this with a Sadistic Choice as a result. The vampire's bite doesn't drain the victim outright but causes their body to grow "branches" with fruits of their own blood, which will eventually kill the victim when their blood has been transferred completely to the fruits. The only way for people to survive is to eat the fruit that grows from their body, but the drawback is that afterward they will be consumed by a ravenous thirst for blood, essentially damning themselves to be a vampire afterward. The story ends with the protagonist's girlfriend ravenously consuming one of her own fruits.
  • Page-Turn Surprise: The horrors are often revealed on the page next to the one they appear or start approaching the characters.
  • Parental Marriage Veto: The premise of "Approval".
  • Perverse Puppet: In "Marionette Mansion", a trade puppeteer decides that it's the puppets who decide what to do, and they control the puppeteer so they can do whatever they want. He then decides to take advantage of this with his magic puppet Jean-Pierre. It ends predictably horribly.
  • Please Put Some Clothes On: Auntie Tamae in "The Town Without Streets" is a bit too unconcerned with her lack of privacy, and her niece Saiko reacts accordingly.
  • Prehensile Hair: In "The Long Hair in the Attic", a girl's hair decapitates her for trying to cut it. It still hangs around, dragging the head with it as its body.
  • Primal Fear: "Thing that Washed Ashore" invokes a number of these while putting together the situation the people who were eaten by the Sea Monster had to go through, such as being Eaten Alive and unable to die or even move inside its gut, being trapped in the pitch darkness of the deep sea for seven years, and the only things they could see through the sea monster's translucent skin were many even more horrific sea monsters.
  • Promoted to Parent: Kazuya Hikizuri. Haruhiko in "Marionette Mansion" seems to have been promoted to Natsumi's parent as well.
  • Proportionately Ponderous Parasites: "Washed Ashore" features a serpentine creature the size of a whale with a head resembling a mass of barnacles and translucent flesh which probably glowed when it was alive. Onlookers see smaller creatures through its clear skin, but in a horrifying twist on this trope, its parasites are humans that it consumed, who managed to survive being eaten by absorbing nutrients inside the creature's intestine. Understandably, they've all been driven insane after being trapped inside a sea monster for seven years.
  • Pun: "Village of the Siren" conflates industrial sirens with mythological siren song.
  • Pushover Parents:
    • In "Ice Cream Bus", it's a plot point that Sonohara is afraid to forbid Tomoki from riding the ice cream bus because Tomoki threatens to leave and go live with his mother instead.
    • Souichi Tsujii's parents often act this way, ostensibly because they see him as their youngest baby and don't believe he is a threat to anyone.
  • "Ray of Hope" Ending:
    • "The Window Next Door": The creepy lady's pursuits have brought her close enough that Hiroshi can no longer sleep safely in his room... but they've also warped her house and convinced the parents that there's something wrong, and the family are planning to move. It's unlikely they'd stay in there another night now, anyway.
    • "Bullied". The mother snaps and begins to bully her son the same way she did his father but she plans to do so at the playground she and her husband frequently played at when they were children, leaving open the possibility that someone will notice what she's doing and alert the police.
    • "The Town Without Streets": The protagonist's aunt kills the serial killer that chased her and realizing that her aunt might still have her sanity left, the protagonist pleads her aunt to flee the town with her. The aunt just wordless guides her out of the town before retreating back to the alleyway, where she would be subjected to endless harassment and spying. The protagonist ends up literally walking into the light of the outside world, unable to save anyone but herself, but she is safe from any obsessive family member or murderous stalker that seek her harm.
  • Rule of Three: In "Honored Ancestors", the sight of the connected scalps of Makita's family causes Risa to undergo a mental break and lose her memory three times, with Makita quickly bringing her up to speed the second time it happens, which is after she tries to escape.
  • Scary Scarecrows: The story "Scarecrows" uses scarecrows in two ways:
    • A father mourning over his recently deceased daughter is enraged when her fiance shows up at her grave. He holds the fiance responsible for her death and in his fury picks up a scarecrow some children had left behind when they were done playing with it. He plants it on his daughter's grave, explaining that the fiance is vermin and that scarecrows keep vermin away.
    • This leads to the village discovering that by setting up scarecrows at the cemetery, the scarecrows will take on the appearance of the person whose grave they're planted on. If they're uprooted, they revert back to their cloth-like state. The scarecrows cannot talk, but they have a subtle capacity to facial expressions, which is enough for those who want to see their loved ones again. One murdered boy's scarecrow's stare causes his nervous murderer to trip and be impaled, while the dead daughter's scarecrow may or may not have killed her fiance. Both the means and the why are left undisclosed.
  • Scary Stinging Swarm: In "Beehive", a young boy can control wasps and sends them to scare off the protagonist. Though they don't sting him or anything, they just make him leave.
  • Scrubbing Off the Trauma: The obsessive-compulsive mother in "The Groaning Drain" deals with this when she accidentally kills her husband and his blood won't wash off the floorboards. Then she tries cleaning her skin...
  • Sea Monster: One of these features prominently in "Washed Ashore". Although it's quite horrific on its own, the titular prehistoric-looking monster is implied to be the least of your worries if you're trapped deep beneath the waves. Another one, which looks distinctly like Godzilla, appears briefly in "The Supernatural Transfer Student".
  • Shameless Fanservice Girl: This mindset is embraced by Saiko's aunt Tamae in "The Town Without Streets". Because everyone in the strange conglomeration of buildings is constantly peeping on someone or being peeped on, it's impossible to have privacy in your home. Because of this, Tamae has decided to throw modesty to the wind and only wear panties, figuring that if she can't hide her body from people, there's no point in making much of an effort to try. She tries to get Saiko to do the same, but Saiko is too weirded out and refuses.
  • Skewed Priorities: The father from "Hanging Balloons". There are giant killer balloons swarming above Tokyo, assimilating civilians left and right, yet somehow the father thinks getting to work on time is more important, which gets him killed moments after he leaves the house. Some readers have interpreted the father's fate as a reference to Japan's "karoshi" note culture.
  • Slow Transformation: Possibly the most horrific example occurs in "The Hell of the Doll Funeral", in which a child contracts Early Onset Doll's Disease. She transforms first into something like a living doll, then into something that hopefully hasn't been a living anything for a long time.
  • Surreal Horror: Many of the stories have utterly strange and unexplainable concepts, like parasitic hair, girls dying of prettiness, giant head balloons that kill people, or an ancestral hive-mind made by stitching craniums together, but the stories have an equally unsettling quality by the people in the stories often acting in strange ways that seem unlike how any normal person would behave, as if to stoke the horror.
  • Sweets of Temptation: In "Ice Cream Bus", Sonohara, a single father, moves to a new neighborhood with his young son Tomoki. There is a bus that drives children around the neighborhood, with the friendly driver giving them free ice cream. Sonohara becomes suspicious of this, and discovers that the children eventually start turning into ice cream if they eat enough of it.
  • Taken for Granite: In "Tombs", the residents transform into grave markers when they die. However, when the process is disturbed by moving the dead from the exact location of their death, they transform irregularly into hideous corpses riddled with jagged stone growths.
  • Tear Off Your Face: In "Flesh-Colored Horror", Chikara's mother rips Maya's face off (revealing that she wears a skin suit like her in the process) in a desperate attempt to save herself after Chikara dissolves her skin suit.
  • Thrown Down a Well: The disturbed corpses in "Tombs" are dealt with in this way.
  • Toilet Humor: One of his stories is titled "A Shit to Remember". You can pretty much guess what it's going to be about. Junji Ito takes his sweet time to unload a great number of Puns, culminating in the story's protagonist literally losing his (fake) shit.
  • Too Dumb to Live: In "The Hanging Balloons", the town is being haunted by a massive swarm of giant floating heads with nooses hanging from them, all of which are intent on killing everyone (especially the person with "their" face) and cannot be stopped. The protagonist's father... decides that, instead of locking the doors and windows and remaining safe, he needs to go to the office and get some paperwork done. When his children point out the very clear danger waiting for them outside, he says he can just protect his neck by wrapping his arm around it. Predictably, only a few steps out the door, he's snagged by a noose and dragged away.
  • Town with a Dark Secret: Featured in many of these stories.
  • Toy Transmutation: In "The Hell of the Doll Funeral", children contract a disease that turns them into dolls. This being Ito, it gets even worse after that.
  • Theme Twin Naming: In "Souichi's Birthday", Souichi's twin is named Soji.
  • Uncanny Family Resemblance: Koichi Tsujii and his cousin Yuusuke look very alike, to the point where a girl with an unrequited crush on Yuusuke initially mistakes Koichi for him and faints on seeing Koichi.
  • The Unreveal: In many stories, it ends not explaining why or how the events of the story happened, what initiated the paranormal horror to begin with, or if there's any way to stop it from happening again.
  • Unseen Evil:
    • "Thing that Washed Ashore" ends with the heavy implication that when all the people eaten by the sea monster were trapped inside its translucent gut, they saw many even worse monsters out in the water as it swam through the ocean abyss.
    • "Falling" has a number of people mysteriously floating up into the sky, out of sight, and then crashing back down days later, dead and with grimaces of horror etched onto their faces. The characters surmise they must've seen something absolutely terrifying when they were transported away.
  • Vomit Indiscretion Shot: "The Supernatural Transfer Student". As a zombie, Shibayama is constantly vomiting from his mouth.
  • Voodoo Doll: Souichi's in the habit of using them.
  • War Is Glorious: The big brother Adera in "Deserter" wanted to draft in the Japanese Imperial Army, but a factory accident prevented him from doing so. Furukawa has the opposite mindset through experience and chose to desert the army.
  • Weapon Wields You: In "The Reanimator's Sword", the titular sword brings dead people back to life if they are cut by it, and the protagonist uses this ability to bring back his dead grandfather. However, the sword then takes control of them, and kills its previous owner so that it can bond itself to the protagonist, and this causes all the people it had revived to die again.
  • Year Inside, Hour Outside: In "Long Dream", Mukoda is a man who has supernaturally lengthy and complex dreams that seem to last unnaturally long, eventually advancing into millennia, although to an outsider they only last a few seconds. His physical and mental state gradually start deteriorating as he struggles to even remember what happened the previous day in reality, and he eventually degenerates into a grotesque ghoul with a massively enlarged cranium as he enters a dream that lasts an eternity.
  • You Are Worth Hell: In "Where the Sandman Lives", Mari's boyfriend Yuuji risks being turned inside out by a dream version of himself every time he falls asleep. When he finally passes out, Mari duct tapes her hand to his, hoping that it will keep him anchored and that his counterpart will not be able to crawl out of his mouth. It fails. When the counterpart's arm comes out of Yuuji's mouth, Mari finds herself being dragged in by the hand as he is turned inside out. Rather than try to free herself, she allows herself to be pulled in so she can stay with him.
  • You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In "A Father's Love", the titular father is able to possess his children's bodies. He forces both his sons to commit suicide when he decides they aren't living up to his expectations, and later tries to do the same to his daughter, since his wife is pregnant again with her "replacement". Subverted when it's revealed in the end that his sons really did commit suicide by their own free will, and rushed to get his daughter and wife to stop leaving.
  • Youkai: "The Hanging Balloons" riffs on the classic nukekubi tales. After a Teen Idol is found nearly decapitated by an apparent suicide, her fans begin seeing a giant version of her head floating in the sky. From there, more giant noose-bearing balloons of people's heads show up, hunting their own living counterparts.
  • Zombie Puke Attack: In "The Supernatural Transfer Student", Shibayama gets turned into a constantly vomiting zombie.
Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection - TV Tropes (2024)
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