Book 13 of 26 books for 2024! Fighting to complete most of my objective, in spite of life throwing me a lot of tough curveballs.

I’ve spent a significant amount of time talking about the work of Junji Ito, a groundbreaking manga horror writer. His works are bizarre, often surreal, fantastically grotesque, and genuinely haunting. There are a number of famous complete graphic novels by Ito, notably Gyo and Uzumaki, but there are also many collections of his shorter works. The most recent, released in July of 2024, is Alley.

The volume collects ten of Ito’s short stories, all of which apparently date from before 2011 (when this edition was first printed in Japanese). They are all fascinating and, as you can see from the cover art, creepy as hell.

Here is a short list of some of the highlights for me:

• Alley. The titular story features a young man who takes up a room in a boarding house next to a walled-off alley. At night, however, his sleep is disturbed by the sounds of children playing next door. When he decides to investigate, he finds far more danger — and nightmares — than he could have ever imagined.
• The Ward. When a woman ends up in the hospital due to a car accident, she soon finds that the other women in her ward have something strange about them. They all seem to act as if they were sharing a single mind…
• Town of No Roads. This one, the best of the collection to me, is nearly indescribable. It starts with a young woman being stalked by a classmate at school, evolves into a strange obsession with her by her own family… and ends with her traveling to live with an aunt, whose entire town has been engulfed in a massive maze-like structure that nobody can explain or apparently escape.
• Blessing. As is tradition, a man asks the father of his love for permission to marry her… which is outright refused. He is encouraged to continue trying, however, by other members of the family of his would-be bride. After years of brutal rejections, the man opts to clear away the only obstacle to being with the love of his life. (You will almost certainly not see where this one is going.)

This is not the strongest of Junji Ito’s collections, but is definitely enjoyable and worth reading for fans of Ito’s work. If you’ve never read manga before, be prepared to read the book essentially backwards: Japanese manga is read right-to-left, so the entire book is flipped from what westerners would typically expect, with the spine of the book on the right side as you read it. I personally find it a fun brain tickle to adjust my reading for this unfamiliar approach.

While I was reading Alley, I got a strong sense of deja vu and wondered if I had inadvertently read it before. This is not the case: it turns out that many of the stories in Alley were used as segments for the Netflix anime series Junji Ito: Maniac, an anthology based on Ito’s work. In particular, the stories “Ice Cream Bus,” “Mold,” and “Alley” were all adapted for the animated series.

Ito’s work is compelling to me because he finds horror in the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Though the modern, rational world would seem to have no place for supernatural horror, Ito shows us that we are all one step away from the darkness, no matter how brightly lit a room we have in the middle of a city.