Hallucinations From The Womb is a single-volume collection of short stories by Mohiro Kitoh, better known as the author of Bokurano and Shadow Star. The stories all take place in Shell City, a futuristic yet decaying city that constantly builds itself upwards, leaving the ruined lower portions buried underground. This decay is mirrored in the minds of its citizens, and the various stories illustrate the degree to which they have become corrupted. Each of the stories is told in the form of a police procedural, with two police officers being the only characters who appear in all of the stories. It contains some very interesting insights on the human condition but, as with Shadow Star, it is borderline Not Safe for Work.
Hallucinations From The Womb contains the following tropes:
- Bio Punk: Human cloning is a lucrative business in Shell City. Some clones, known as Shoryoshi, are bred for use as "living libraries" due to their enhanced memories.
- The Bluebeard: In the first story, a man clones his wife multiple times (once for every year she's lived) and preserves the clones in tanks of liquid. He's arrested once the newest clone catches on to this.
- Cyberpunk: A particularly dark example.
- Deadpan Snarker: The male police officer.
- Dystopia: Shell City itself. From what we see, it has a police registry where everything about its citizens is kept on record, many books are banned, homelessness runs rampant, and it has really shoddy architecture.
- Flying Car: There are flying ambulances in Shell City, though regular cars exist too.
- Hive City: The setting of Shell City is one of these. It builds up on itself over the years, and the lower layers are completely buried.
- Innocent Fanservice Girl: Inside the video game developer's life-size reconstruction of his game.
- It Amused Me: The excuse given by an insane video game developer for abducting a bunch of teenage girls to put in a life-size version of his game.
- Love Potion: One of the stories involves a boy trying to find one.
- No Name Given: None of the characters have their names spoken.
- Our Zombies Are Different: Class C Corpses, a phenomenon that occurs only in Shell City.
- People Jars: The clones of the first villain's wife are kept in these.
- People Zoo: The insane video game developer's life-size version of his game might as well be this, since the people inside are in glass enclosures and aren't allowed to leave.
- Rape as Drama: In the second story, a man has sex with a girl and gives her an STD that will kill her in three years.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: All over the place.
- Zashiki-warashi: One appears in the fifth story. She befriends an infrastructure inspector, and turns out to be causing sectors of the city to collapse so he'll have a reason to stay with her.
