YMMV / Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Is the lady in "The Window Next Door" actually malicious, or is she trying to get to know her neighbors but ends up scaring them due to her strange powers and lack of social skills?
  • In "Bullied," Nao's motivation is left up to interpretation. Does Nao leave his wife because of reasons unrelated to his bullying (and the narrator gives alternative scenarios that could make plenty of sense, such as being killed by the yakuza or running off with another woman)? Or did he genuinely want his wife to revert to her past self of being a childish bully? This depends on whether you see the wife as genuinely reformed but unable to resist her sadistic tendencies, or an utter asshole who cannot take responsibility for harming others and will blame it on her husband's actions.
• Anvilicious:
  • "Bullied" by far is one of Junji Ito's scariest short stories because it could happen in real life, about a grown-up bully that seemingly reformed and married her former victim. It makes no bare-bones about the fact that some people never grow out of their cruel tendencies and if given the right incentive will snap back after a lifetime of good behavior. Said woman snaps when her husband leaves her one day without warning, leaving her to raise their child as a single parent. She theorizes that maybe it was his form of revenge in the making. When she realizes that their son looks like the husband did as a boy, she dresses like her childhood self and proceeds to start abusing her own child. One can hope that Japanese child services intervene given she suffered an Ignored Epiphany. If indeed that was the husband's plan all along, then it furthers the anvil that revenge is senseless when innocents are caught in the crossfire.
• Base-Breaking Character: Rie from "Memory". One camp loves the fact that she is one of the few genuinely morally grey Ito protagonists because she did strangle her sister to death and is quite vain about her looks, but also genuinely regrets her actions. The other camp hates her for the same action, arguing that she is just a selfish, vain murderer.
• Complete Monster:
  • Vol. 3's "Flesh-Colored Horror": Mrs. Kawabe grew obsessed with the "beauty" of the skinless human body after seeing her alchemist husband's corpse, resulting from a failed medicine of eternal life that made his skin detachable. Re-enacting the procedure, Mrs. Kawabe manipulated her sister Maya into taking the treatment, and regularly pours the boiling medicine on her son Chikara, leaving him only a tube to breathe through. Mrs. Kawabe's abuse renders Chikara insane and violent, and causes him severe skin injuries. Ms. Kawabe also makes a habit of flashing her naked, skinless body to random pedestrians at night and takes sexual pleasure in their horrified reactions. When Chikara's teacher Ms. Takigawa investigates her too closely, Mrs. Kawabe kidnaps Ms. Takigawa and plans to force her to take the medicine. After Chikara burns her skin suit in response to her abuse, Mrs. Kawabe dooms Maya to death by desperately ripping the skin off of her face, causing Ms. Takigawa to faint in horror.
  • Vol. 8's "Blood-Bubble Bushes": The Mysterious Man is an evil vampire that can cast an ominous spell that causes bushes of blood fruits to grow from people's skin. Using it on a village, the man turns most of its citizens, including children into an entire forest of Blood-Bubble Bushes that he keeps in his castle. Some unlucky souls are still alive, practically mummified. Others don't turn into bushes, but only because they ate some of their own fruits and were turned into bloodsuckers themselves. When protagonists Ansai and Kana stop by his residence when their car breaks down, the man puts on a façade of kindness and offers them shelter, when really his only goal is to infect them and have them join his grisly garden. They manage to escape when some vampire children they encounter break in and start feasting on his supply, at which point the man viciously stabs one of the kids to death with a pitchfork. Even when they escape, the man has still condemned them to certain doom, as Ansai has begun to sprout tiny blood-bubbles on his hand and Kana starts devouring one of hers.
  • Vol. 11's "The Village of Sirens": Lord Doleman is a devil-worshipping sorcerer who terrorized the village of Shirobe with his legion of demons in the Middle Ages. Resurfacing 300 years later through reincarnation, Doleman releases his imprisoned demon Cruffith, using the monster's Siren Call to take over Shirobe and transform the village women into monstrous Harpies. Doleman sends these harpies to steal countless infants around the country to slaughter in a blood ritual for summoning his demonic master Lufudo, and has any who fail to do so fed to Cruffith. Doleman soon kidnaps the young girl Yukari to offer as the final sacrifice to Lufudo. While Yukari escapes and Doleman is killed, his actions allow Lufudo to emerge and begin his hellish reign upon the Earth.
  • Vol. 12's "Back Alley": Shinobu Uchiyama is a 14-year-old sociopath and the one responsible for a series of murders that happened in the alley behind her mother's boarding house. Violently territorial of "her" alley, Shinobu, as a child, murdered a group of children for playing there and began using it as a killing ground when her father fenced it off. Killing her classmates and even her own father, Shinobu began taunting the trapped ghosts of the victims and when hero Ishida investigates, fatally stabs him, gloating about her crimes and giggling as he dies.
  • Vol. 13's "The Circus is Here": The Ringmaster is the jolly chief of the Papyrus Circus who is secretly a sadistically demonic Death God. Forcing the woman Leiliya to lure men into joining his circus troupe, the Ringmaster has each performer perish in a fatal accident while performing, reaping their souls for his own pleasure. With his entire troupe all dead, the Ringmaster manipulates the entire crowd to perform for his next show, ready to meet the same fate as all those employed by him.
• Ear Worm: From the 2023 Anime, we get the Ice Cream Bus song, which sounds like something that wouldn't be out of place in Spongebob Squarepants.
  Ice Cream, Ice Cream, Ice Cream Bus! What flavor will it be today?
• Heartwarming Moments: At the end of "The Town Without Streets", Auntie Tamae, who had previously come close to assaulting her niece Saiko due to her privacy-less Sanity Slippage, saves Saiko from a murderer and directs her homeward, acknowledging that she wants a different life.
• Memetic Mutation: Frankenstein's Monster laughing at the Doctor's misery became the "Dude! Let me in! I'm a fairy!" meme circa 2006.
• Narm:
  • One story involves countless generations of a family forming a chain of heads, which is connected to the still living descendant. The concept and execution is fairly creepy... the problem being if you look at it the right way, the chain of heads looks like it was the result of windows 98 glitching up while someone was trying to drag a picture of a head.
  • The entire premise of "The Will". Two teenage girls who hated each other committed suicide at the same time and went to haunt each other's family, not knowing the other had died. The sheer Contrived Coincidence to make it possible, not to mention the fact that one half of the pair's motivation can easily fall into Wangst territory for some readers, probably kills off any dramatic moment or tension the story had up to that point.
  • The ending of "Slug Girl" is disturbing as all get-out... unless you notice how similar it is to the SpongeBob SquarePants episode I Was A Teenage Gary, in which case it's hilarious.
  • Ditto "Hanging Blimp", the premise of which (giant balloons shaped like people's heads) bears more than a little resemblance to commercials for Air Heads candy.
    • While other characters' deaths in this short story are reasonable (Driven to Suicide, taken by surprise, etc.), the protagonist's father is killed when he decides that, even though there are giant floating heads killing the population en masse floating around, he still needs to ''go to work.''
• Nausea Fuel:
  • "Ice Cream Bus" is fairly disgusting when we see a group of children all licking a huge lump of ice cream on the floor.
  • "Mold" has a sickening atmosphere as the fungus overrides a house.
  • "Flesh Colored Horror" as well. Especially the ending, with skin being torn and bare muscles being ripped apart. Ugh.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending:
  • "The Window Next Door": The creepy lady's pursuits have brought her close enough that Hiroshi can no longer sleep safely in his room... but they've also warped her house and convinced the parents that there's something wrong, and the family are planning to move. It's unlikely they'd stay in there another night now, anyway.
  • "Bullied". The mother snaps and begins to bully her son the same way she did his father but she plans to do so at the playground she and her husband frequently played at when they were children, leaving open the possibility that someone will notice what she's doing and alert the police.
• Realism-Induced Horror: "Bullied" is one of Junji Ito's scariest stories precisely because it lacks the usual monsters or strange happenings. The mother is the Villain Protagonist, who claims to be a Reformed Bully from her childhood days. She married her former victim Nao when he saw her again and forgave her after she apologized, but then he vanished one day after they had a son. Cue the mother suffering a breakdown, lashing out at her son out of frustration, and regressing to her childhood cruelty when realizing how much their son looks like her vanished husband. Her son knows something is wrong but is too little to comprehend that a parent shouldn't behave this way. She theorizes while dressing up as her childhood self that this was Nao's revenge on her. One can only hope that passersby will see her abusing her child in the park, as the end of the story implies, and call the cops. Indeed, some people report that seeing the mother seemingly turn into a monster at the end came as a relief from how uncomfortably realistic the scenario was.
  • The early part of "The Town Without Streets" as well, considering the sheer amounts of privacy invasion and Gaslighting that happens. While it becomes very fantastical, just the fear of being spied on (even by your own family!) and gaslit is genuinely frightening.
• The Woobie: Despite being a Creepy Child, and one that actually harmed one of his classmates, Chikara from Flesh Colored Horror more than likely instills these feelings in readers, being a kindergarten-aged child who is frequently subjected to the twisted experiments of his mother, leaving him with an unnerving skin condition. He literally cries out in terror as she begins these procedures on him, and is curled up in a ball prior to that.
  • The woman in The Window Next Door could count too, if you subscribe to the Alternative Character Interpretation that she wasn't actually trying to do anything bad to the protagonist.

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