The witch tormenting a young man in Futon turns out to be a product of guilty infidelity and psychoactive fungus, his own misogynist hallucination. Sometimes Itō toys with horror cliches about corrupting femininity directly: “I want your beautiful head for my collection,” goes the come-on to one bad boyfriend. Those monstrous women almost always prevail, amoral and resplendent, their male casualties unmourned. They only come alive through communion with the grotesque. Unless you count that house, Itō’s men are all feckless, faithless, or blandly conniving. In the afterword, Itō writes: “I was doing plenty of work on illustrations and manga about cats or about society, but even taking that into account, the time seems too empty … I feel like I wasted a whole lot of time.” The new Viz collection Fragments of Horror is not only his first English-language book since then – it brings together the only horror comics he’s published in the past eight years anywhere. But Itō’s notoriety was more aesthetic than commercial Dark Horse Comics gave up on licensing his work after three volumes in 2006. The images were bizarre: a teenage girl grows a haircut of hypnotic coils, her teacher becomes a humanoid snail, and eyes pinwheel through faces. Viz Media did bring over his series Uzumaki, about a city intricately cursed by symbols of spirals, which read a little like a Tales from the Crypt story scripted by Vladimir Nabokov. Itō’s work has enjoyed a murky fame outside Japan since the early 2000s, even before there was much of an infrastructure for North American manga publishing. It haunted her, a friend told me, because it captured “the horror of being alive … where most horror stories would end at death, he keeps his characters in the hell of surviving.” The Enigma of Amigara Fault ends abruptly, with the implication that it could have gone on for dozens of pages more.

Fascinated onlookers start squeezing inside the holes, desperate to find one that will fit them. The premise of The Enigma of Amigara Fault was odd, a little unnerving, not exactly terrifying: after a massive earthquake, authorities find human-shaped openings lining the new landscape. O ver the past decade, one particular work by the Japanese cartoonist Junji Itō kept popping up on blogs and message boards, bootlegged by amateur translators.

Fragments of horror ito