Phantoms, Flesh, and the Dreaming Machine: Inside Junji Ito’s "Shiver”

Apocalyptic scenarios and personal bodily distortions play out, slipping into the perceived "reality" of life, revealing it to be mere illusory covering for the boils festering beneath the surface, in Shiver, by mangaka maestro supreme, Junji Ito.

One of the single most disturbing mangas I’ve ever read—surpassing, to some extent, even the impact made on me by Ito’s Uzumaki—Shiver is a collection of nine stories that explore the outer edges of surrealistic body horror and a near-Kafkaesque descent into a world wherein madness and “reality” fuse into a seamless, gurgling, oozing, bleeding horrific shape. Beneath the surface of its miniature purgatorial descent run the submerged themes of social isolation, power, control, hierarchy, dominance, and submission. The protagonists are lost in the mad, macabre, secret workings of a universe driven by mechanisms of destructive horror—a predatory, other reality that promises, like a circling vulture, to dive in for the kill. It reveals, using its brutal beak to strip away the putrescent flesh of the surface, a festering underbelly of churning, malevolent decay.

The first story, “Used Record,” is the opening note in a “symphony of Hells” (to borrow from Rimbaud)—the strange tale of a mysterious 45 RPM record owned by a young woman whose friend kills her, literally, for it. The record is an a cappella voice singing a scat song—an audio ghost that drives the listener to madness or obsession, the siren song from the tomb.

“Shiver,” the title tale, is a dark dream of a disease that infects its sufferers from some world beyond; a phantom doctor who is the inverse image of a healer; and a girl whose arm becomes a cheesecloth of burned-out holes while she laughs, like a tittering anomaly from a bad dream.

“Fashion Model,” the tale of an unlikely fashion model with a hideous visage who stars in a film, gives us an examination of beauty, deformity, and personal discomfort—the “social norms” of what is and isn’t attractive, the idea that ugliness somehow masks the evil that lurks, tumescent, beneath the scarred and hideous surface. It ends, like so many of these tales, in a swamp of bloody anthropophagy.

“Hanging Blimp” is a visual metaphor for the false world that floats alongside our true, brutalized form, hanging beneath a sinister “happy face” that, in this dream vignette, floats quite literally in the clouds, seeking to ensnare victims—whose image it wears—in the hanging noose suspended below. The theme of a mass disaster, so endemic to Japanese horror tales, unfolds while the news media scrambles to cope with the hanging horrors. The actions of the characters leave the reader pondering whether this is meant to be taken seriously as “reality”—a father who decides, despite the vulture-like hideous death floating outside, to make a run for his office seems both comic and intensely strange, dreamlike behavior.

“Marionette Mansion” gives us the story of Haruhiko, a boy who travels with his itinerant father, a puppeteer, who dies, leaving both boys orphans. He and his girlfriend Kuniko go to visit his brother, who has become rich and eccentric. His brother, Yukihiko, and his family have become “living marionettes,” controlled mysteriously by wires descending from the specially designed ceiling of their mansion. The metaphor is clear: the unseen powers of social opprobrium, controlling us from above, dictate the terms of what we think of as beautiful, normal, and acceptable life—and, like little sister Natsumi, who is willing to abdicate her role in deciding her own fate because she wants to be a beautiful ballerina, it suggests that the mysterious servants above, pulling the strings—capitalism, commerce, media, even traditional gender and societal roles—are the provenance of the phony, the bearers of a stilted life at the end of a string. (See Note.)

Swimming in Grue

“Painter” gives us the dismally demonic Tomie, a beautiful young model for artist Mori, whose depth brings out the ugly specter haunting this narcissistic, arrogant, self-obsessed young woman. That she destroys artists such as sculptor Iwata pays testament to the fact that, internally, her ravenous, awestruck sense of beauty and entitlement are the ugly things revealed in the “truth” of the art. The vision of art as revelatory exorcist—unmasking the demonic, the hideous internal nature of things—results in the sum of the parts being reborn: an eternal infestation of the rottenness at the core of the universal material experience.

“The Long Dream” covers science-fictional territory explored by Stephen King in “The Jaunt,” from Skeleton Crew. A young man plagued by narcolepsy is troubled by dreams that seem to spin out, while he experiences them, for an eternity. He strangely begins to mutate, until a shocking conclusion. Ito is masterful at depicting the horrors that distort the body—a maestro of the image of the mutilated—and can inflict a sense of sickening dread in his clean, otherwise calm, work. Here, as in so many of these tales, he moves us to hideous revulsion.

The “long dream” is, of course, also a metaphor for the wakeless delusion that spins out from our own lives—our sense of self interrupted, mutated, and made monstrous in the reflection of our existential nightmare.

The Caterpillar and the Human Pimple

“I go for horror, but if I can’t get horror, I’m not proud. I go for the gross-out.” —Stephen King

The above quote is an apt summation for the final two tales, both of which take absurd and mind-bending atrocious disgust to new levels. “Honored Ancestors” gives us the tale of Shuichi and Risa, his girlfriend—showing us the mentally devastated and traumatized Risa, who has nightmare visions of a giant caterpillar. Shuichi, whose father is dying, is at the heart of this particular monstrous invasion, and the reason is his ancestral lineage of pure, sickening aspect. The denouement of this tale is quite beyond our capacity to reveal, but suffice it to say that it hints at the unerring evil “in the blood,” handed down generation to generation, like the vast chain of heads in a caterpillar’s form.

Our final tale is “Greased,” which thrusts us into the belly of a world inhabited by a young girl whose life is, quite literally, covered in the sort of slime we find coating objects—walls, doors, what-have-you—in fever dreams infused with psychological anxiety. Slime, corruption, filth, and inescapable ooze destroy the social capital of a person in a society where conformity is so highly valued and traditional sex and social roles are still rigidly observed. The slime permeates the walls, floors, doors, and bodies of this tale—ejaculate of ooze dripping out, like a squeezed pimple, from the corrupted form of the protagonist’s diseased and malevolent brother (he squeezes the noxious drip from his own head, which is suffused with grotesque oily growth—but we give away too much).

Junji Ito finishes each tale with commentary on his initial inspiration, plus notes—often substantially different from the resultant story. It is uncertain what drives a man to craft such jaw-droppingly sickening examples of his art: perhaps a reflection on the anxiety of living and adapting to a staid, conservative culture—one which has experienced the atomic bomb and the group disasters that turned Japanese society into a version of the catastrophes inherent in Uzumaki and “Hanging Blimp.” Here, that sense of building on the dreamlike and absurd, using it as a mirror to hold up a reflection of what his own society perceives as beautiful, deviant, and degenerate, is both instructive and revealing. It is also highly entertaining, and Shiver is one of the great, great collections of horror manga ever published. Order a copy, and until it arrives, you may find that you (forgive us) shiver with anticipation.

Note: The message here is delivered with little subtlety--it is blatant. The itinerant family defies bourgeois convention. But in their puppets, they seek to subvert, through control, the image of the Japanese society. When Yukihiko enjoys vast success by deciding to join this society, he attaches the "strings of control" to himself, as a puppet of undeen, souless powers above: i.e., in the ceiling. His bourgeois life conceals horror, control, and, finally, bloody and sickening betrayal and tragedy. Very much an allegory for the struggle between classes.

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My book: Theater of the Worm: Essays on Poe, Lovecraft, Bierce, and the Machinery of Dread (Amazon)