A crowd of people in a place where inexplicably strange people roam.... This is a scene that will stay in your mind.
You shouldn't feel that you must always welcome every visitor who comes to you.
Fuan no Tane ("Seeds of Anxiety") is a horror manga by Masaaki Nakayama which contains many unrelated short, surreal and often nightmarish oneshot stories. Most are only a few pages long and involve some poor random bystander stumbling into a creepy situation that they may or may not make it out of.
Though the original manga only ran for a small handful of volumes it was popular enough to eventually spawn a continuation of the series called Fuan no Tane Plus that adds over a hundred terrifying new tales to the collection, and eventually a third compilation called Fuan no Tane* or Fuan no Tane Asterisk. Either way, this is one graphic novel you'll probably want to read with the lights on... not that it'll help you any...
Tropes appearing in Fuan no Tane:
- Author Avatar: Masaaki Nakayama appears in a couple of stories as a bystander wearing a hat telling some event of his life.
- Berserk Button: Many of the entities seem to hate being seen, becoming hostile whenever someone acknowledges their presence.
- Black Comedy:
- Rare, but it does come up. The most notable example is a man arming himself against an intruder, opening the door, seeing a horrible corpse-faced ghost on his doorstep... and the ghost stares at him, apologizes for coming to the wrong house, and vanishes awkwardly through the wall, leaving the man deeply confused.
- "Discomfort" is another example. A man is walking through a city when he glances into an alley and sees a ghost. He stares at it for a moment... then decides "I'm just going to pretend I didn't see that" and leaves.
- The Blank: Some of the ghosts are faceless, which is marginally less frightening than most of the others who have extremely distorted faces.
- Call-Back:"The Truth Behind the Rumor" references the events of "Traffic Safety".
- Creepy Child: The occasional child spirit (or whatever they really are) such as the thing encountered by a shrine priest in "Verdict".
- Downer Ending: Several, but the "Scene" anthology takes the cake, after trying to save her best friend, Tomo tries to save her best friend of a stalking ghost, she decides to take the matter on her own hands, trying to actually fight against it... the last shot of the story is she being raped by tentacles.
- Ear Ache: A girl in an early chapter of volume 1 complains of one. Two little girls walking home from school are followed by a creepy man holding a pair of scissors. Then, that girls ear falls off.
- Enfant Terrible: The hideous, eyeless dwarf...thing in the hallway of the hospital's maternity ward. It has really big teeth.i'm a baby. please... hug me. please. i promise i won't bite
- Exact Words: They will never find you here. The story ends with people yelling to the girl that she can stop hiding.
- Evil-Detecting Dog: Or evil-detecting boy, as it were. A set of stories revolve around a group of friends, with one typically being dopey and unlucky. The other boys all like him though and consider him the luckiest kid around, because whenever some supernatural danger is near, he has a sixth sense for catching on and booking it before anything bad happens or they make some terrible mistake.
- Fingore: One story revolves around a schoolgirl noticing a strange cloud of smoke coming out of a factory chimney thats shaped like a humanoid figure, and points it out for her friend. Cue her finger being painfully wrenched backwards and broken in multiple places. The next panel shows her screaming in pain while the smoke figure disippates.
- Haunted Technology: A few stories, such as "Blind Eye" which is about two security guards who monitor the video feed from a chain of stores, and step away for a moment to attend something else just narrowly missing a horrifically distorted face staring back through the cameras, before disappearing when it sees no one there.
- Humanoid Abomination: Many, many examples.
- Jump Scare: Nakayama manages to make this into a literature-based example, with many of the Nightmare Faces and other creepy reveals happening after a lot of nothing.
- Lightning Can Do Anything: It can apparently abduct people.
- Malevolent Masked Men: The bag-headed man is unnerving partially because of the misshapen face drawn on the bag, and partially because whatever is under the bag is not quite human-shaped. Come on! Let's play!
◊ - Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: The poster of a smiling girl looks like it's an ad for something but the only mark on it is a QR code. When a passerby scans it, it resets his phone to factory settings.
- Missing Child: A little girl playing hide and seek is led by another child to a secret hiding place, where, the mysterious child reassures her, no one will ever find her.
- Mistaken Identity: "Creep" revolves around a boy visiting a friend's house, and spots someone with long hair standing on the roof, thinking it's his friend's sister. While playing, he mentions it in passing, and his friend goes to yell at his sister, who claims she hadn't been anywhere near the roof. Meanwhile,
a figure with long, stripey hair and a horrifying face crawls off the roof, across the large window of the room the boy is sitting in, with the boy having his back turned to the window and being none the wiser. - Nightmare Face: Many a full-page panel reveals a distorted or otherwise horrific face.
- No Ending: Naturally, most of the stories end with nothing resolved and the monsters/ghost still unexplained. If the protagonist is lucky, they'll get off with just a horrible scare or fairly minor injury.
- Not-So-Imaginary Friend: Ochonan is a Creepy Good Friend to All Children who has protected several generations of his adopted family, but likes to keep out of sight, and their drawings of his vertical eyes and mouth tend to disturb adults who never met him. The one to be afraid of is his double, with tilted eyes... but don't worry, as long as you're a good child, you'll never see him.
- Oh, Crap!: Many, many of the protagonists have this reaction when The Reveal happens.
- Rule of Scary: A giant face staring in the window? People made of straw? Just accept it.
- Scary Teeth:
- A pretty girl in an elevator eating a bouquet of flowers. Then we see her mouth...
- The child yokai from "Verdict" has a wide mouth full of needle sharp teeth.
- Stalker with a Crush:
- One story involves a threatening warning to someone who apparently pissed off their stalker, though said stalker is never seen.
- Another story revolves around a guy who finds what he thinks is a box of chocolates intended for someone else at his school desk, and shares them with a friend, only to discover the next day that whoever, or whatever, left the box has carved a message saying it is glad he enjoyed them and that he'll "never escape".
- Spooky Photographs:
- One looks ordinary, but is kind of unsettling and a girl who notices it acts possessed and tries to kill one of the other viewers. Another has a weird face in the background that no one except the photographer can see... and then it starts to talk.
- It turns out that it's not two haunted photos but one. Take a close look at the background features of the photograph in the later-written story "Snapshot" and you can see that it is, in fact, the exact same scene as the photo in the earlier story "Photo". Every element is the exact same, even down to the lighting and camera's vantage point. There's only one difference... The four students who had, previously, been posing for the photograph in "Snapshot", have now all vanished from the picture entirely, leaving only the background scene remaining... as well as the haunting presence which is likely responsible for both the students' disappearance and the female viewer's later possession.
- Surreal Horror: Several stories dont have a traditional scare, instead relying on just how bizarre the premise is, such as "In The Wall" where a construction worker finds a female torso growing out of a wall.
- Urban Legend: Similar tone and settings, but wholly original.
