Kazuki, a young college student living in a small apartment building, is taking out his trash one night when he sees a disheveled young woman dressed in lolita-style clothing sitting in the street by the neighborhood trash pile. Unnerved, he tries to ignore her and pass by, when she asks him a single question: "Do you have a younger sister?" Surprised, he answers that he does, before running off to the safety of his apartment. Passing it off as an isolated encounter with a strange woman, Kazuki decides to think nothing more of it.
But then he starts to see her more and more, and each time her behavior and appearance seem more unusual than the last. When he learns that she's been going through his trash and has even found a way into his apartment by passing herself off as his younger sister while he's at school, he begins to fear that she may even be dangerous. After hearing the legend of the "Strange Lolita", Kazuki becomes determined that he needs to protect himself by scaring the bizarre woman away once and for all. Unfortunately, the young man has no idea of the horrors that await him...
Ibitsu ("Twisted") is a horror manga drawn and written by Ryou Haruka. It was serialized in Square Enix's manga magazine Young GanGan from 2010 to 2013 and compiled into seven volumes. The published volumes also came with two unrelated side stories: The Corridor Of Dolls which is about a group of friends entering a haunted building to write their names on the Wall Of Romance and The Mysterious Tale Of The Editor which is about a mangaka who is plagued by the strange demands of an equally strange editor.
Not to be confused with Kazuto Okada's Sex Comedy manga (and film) of the same name.note
Tropes present in Ibitsu include:
- Abandoned Hospital: When the group of friends hear about a sighting of the Strange Lolita near an abandoned hospital, they go to check it out in hopes they'd find something out about her. Fortunately, they do. It's also the Lolita's base.
- Arc Words: Twisted.
- Big Bad:
- Main story: The Strange Lolita is a mysterious girl in a Lolita dress who spends the story tormenting Kazuki and killing everyone he loves to force him to be her big brother.
- The Corridor of Dolls: The titular dolls haunt the building where the main characters go and trap them inside to take their skin.
- The Mysterious Tale of the Editor: The titular editor, Rukina Midorikawa, forces mangaka Susumo Sano to write her story the way she wants it and abuses him when he refuses, eventually kidnapping him.
- Black Comedy: The "punchline" of The Mysterious Tale Of The Editor is quite black indeed.
- Bring My Brown Pants: Hikari does this in Chapter 3 when the Strange Lolita eats an eyeball.
- Creepy Doll: The bonus story The Corridor Of Dolls is about some of these.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Practically all of them, but the most cruel and drawn out kill that was shown happened to Yuka. She had her knee obliterated by the Lolita. Unable to stand, she tries to crawl away while crying. The Lolita stops that by crushing her hands with the sledgehammer. Finally, after being verbally taunted, Yuka pleads for her life before she gets her head and neck twisted around by the Lolita and another brutal sledgehammer swing, ending her suffering. Made all the more cruel since she was still just a teenager.
- Downer Ending: Kazuki is dead, along with his parents, sister, and friends and gets the blame for the murders and the ending shows the Lolita looking for her next victim.
- Eye Scream: The Strange Lolita staples Kazuki's eye open so he can draw a picture of her.
- Fingore: Multiple examples. Such as the Strange Lolita trying to make herself more beautiful by stealing the finger nails of other girls.
- Gorn: Ramped up steadily as the series goes on. And it starts with a stuffed animal spraying blood everywhere when it's washed.
- Gothic Horror: In this chilling urban-gothic tale, there is a Gothic Lolita Serial Killer who waits by the garbage to find her victims.
- Hope Spot:
- After the events at the hospital, Kazuki wakes up home and safe with his parents. It doesn't last long.
- Hikari and the readers are lulled into a sense of security when Lolita fails to notice her under the desk, as Hikari attempts to leave the classroom, Lolita is there and crushes half of her foot, and ultimately drags her away in the end.
- Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Kazuki's father is impaled with his golf clubs.
- Karma Houdini: The Strange Lolita, typically for J-horror, gets away free and clear.
- Kill the Cutie:
- Yuka is an athletic and cute high school girl with a very large chest. She also suffers the most brutal and agonizing death that was almost completely shown, all because she opted for some solo basketball practice.
- Strongly implied with Hikari. She's a pretty high school girl who gets a few shots of her panties in and has a breast exposed while trying to escape the Strange Lolita. Hikari was never confirmed dead, but if the scalpels the Strange Lolita put into the medical dummy were any indication of Hikari's fate, she was: impaled in her left eye, throat, chest, stomach, many times in her crotch, before having multiple holes drilled into her skull.
- Knee-capping: When the Strange Lolita corners Hikari and a classmate in the gym after school one night, she takes the classmate out of the picture by smashing her kneecap with a sledgehammer. Her knee is so ruined, that even if Yuka had managed to survive, she would have likely needed her lower leg amputated.
- Madness Mantra: "Big brother. Big brother. Big brother. Big brother."
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's left in the open if the Strange Lolita is some Ax-Crazy human Serial Killer or a demonic spirit.
- Meaningful Name: The name of the Strange Lolita's stuffed rabbit, it's name is the most recent big brother she just killed. Throughout Kazuki's story, the rabbit's name is Keiichi, the psychologist that Lolita saw at the mental hospital, and at the end, the rabbit's name is Kazuki.
- Murder the Hypotenuse: The Lolita's solution to the fact that Kazuki already has a younger sister is to personally make sure that Hikari is taken out of Kazuki's life... permanently.
- Murder-Suicide: This is what the police make of all of the Strange Lolita incidents.
- Neck Snap: Ultimately how Yuka meets her end. After being beaten down, she takes the sledgehammer on her chin. The strike is so powerful that it internally decapitated her. When Hikari discovers her body and touches her, Yuka's head twists on the remnants of her neck and droops down in front of her chest.
◊ - Outliving One's Offspring: It's not hard to imagine the terror of Yuka's parents after their daughter was killed. Not only did they have to bury their teenage daughter who had her whole life ahead of her, having to view her broken and mutilated corpse while imagining her suffering is worse than any nightmare to a parent.
- Page-Turn Surprise: Ryo's usage of this is nearly as great as Junji Ito's, a good portion of the manga's most intense and heart pounding moments occur during these.
- Police Are Useless: There have been a lot of claims from people being attacked and stalked by a strange lolita, but the police have dismissed all of these claims as daydreaming.
- Replacement Goldfish: The backstory The Corridor Of Dolls is that a doll maker tried to make a replacement doll for his dead wife before he died himself.
- Self-Harm: The Strange Lolita hurts herself when she feels she isn't a good enough sister.
- Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Kazuki is dead and has been framed for the murders committed by the Strange Lolita, who lives on to continue looking for older brothers as an "urban legend".
- Slasher Movie: Or Slasher Manga, given you have the Strange Lolita as a gimmick-themed Serial Killer who stalks her prey to kill them in gruesome manners.
- Those Two Guys: Kazuki's friends, Gotou and Miyama.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Hikari, Gotou, and Miyama are all dragged away by the Strange Lolita, and while it is clear that she kills them, the reader never sees what happened to them exactly. The only one that is potentially known is Hikari, if the mannequin is anything to go off of, she would've been Impaled with Extreme Prejudice by innumerable scalpels, primarily focused in the groin area.
- When It All Began: The Strange Lolita's abusive elder brother killing her parents. Subverted, as he was just another victim and the Lolita took over the sister's role.
- Would Hit a Girl: The Lolita routinely drives her victims to this.
- Year X: The flashback to The Strange Lolita's past is set in 20XX.
