There are some weather phenomena one quickly learns to associate with specific plots – fog denotes something creepy or mysterious, rain evokes haunting melancholy, wind howls like the souls of victims. Snow is a bit less obvious, though its connotations often run the gamut from coziness to isolation. Manga artist Junji Ito (see Tentacle Tuesday: Junji Ito’s Remina) often uses weather to mirror his characters’ emotions, so it is no surprise that he has a few snowstorm stories under his belt. I welcome snow — in this part of the world, we were lucky enough to finally get a white landscape just in time for New Year’s — but I definitely not want to be trapped in the wintry world depicted by Ito!
Here are a few pages from Fun Winter Vacation, a chapter/self-contained story from Souichi’s Diary of Delights (1997). Souichi is a little creep with more than a slight penchant for the occult, so weird shit happens whenever he is present. That’s him hiding behind the tree in the first panel – fetching lad, isn’t he? One might say he brings people’s darkest thoughts out into the open. You can read the full story here (remember to read right to left!) I’ve heard some readers complain that this narrative doesn’t quite make sense… welcome to Ito’s dreamlike logic. These episodes are meant to be absorbed like a nightmare one can’t quite wake up from, not dissected in the manner of an A leads to B equation.
Revenge, originally published in the June 1993 issue of manga magazine Monthly Halloween, is standard Ito fare, and concerns itself with a woman so beautiful that she drives people to madness… in this case, the notorious Tomie, who dispatches a few new victims and nibbles on a wee bit of human flesh in this snowbound vignette.
Read Revenge in full here, and of course support Ito by purchasing his books. Publisher Viz Media is currently issuing plenty of them in a handsome hardcover format, including stories never previously translated to English.
~ ds