J-Horror/Asian Horror

For J-Horror/Asian Horror week I decided to focus on manga. I actually found the first manga I read after telling my roommate about the theme for this week. I vaguely knew of the one she mentioned, but had never actually read it. The Enigma of Amigara Fault is about human-shaped holes that are found after an earthquake reveals the inside of a mountain. This story is actually quite gothic, because each person can find a hole shaped exactly like them. And what would you do if you found a hole shaped just like you? You would get in it. And the issue in this story is the holes were constructed in such a way that no one who climbed in was able to move out, eventually leading to their own torture.

Reading this manga also reminded me of an online Korean comic I had stumbled across years ago. I was actually too afraid to finish this Korean comic then, and am honestly still too afraid to read it now (I startle easily). After researching, I learned that this comic was called Bongcheon-Dong Ghost and is considered a "screamer comic". And the jump-scare at the end would definitely scare me as the first few pages I could get through were full of suspense (and anxiety).

The elements that are present in both The Enigma of Amigara Fault and Bongcheon-Dong Ghost are unexplained phenomena and a massive amount of suspense. To see if this was potentially a common theme in Japanese horror mangas, I also read the first volume of Homunculus by Hideo Yamamoto. I found that in this manga, the suspense more came from expecting something bad to happen, and not so much from the actual story. That may have been because the main character in Homunculus was already in a less than ideal situation (homeless and without money) whereas in The Enigma and Bongcheon-Dong, the main characters were implied to be in a better situation. Homunculus was again quite gothic, as the horror had an allure: undergo an experimental surgery, and get 700,000 yen. This is even a practice used in real life. People can sign up to be a part of trial experiments and earn money, and these programs generally target those in desperate need of money. But Homunculus did not stray too far from the elements present in my other readings. Although the surgery seemed to do no harm at first, (but the reader can expect that something strange will happen, creating suspense) it was revealed that the experiment was actually successful in enhancing our main character's sixth sense, thus incorporating the unexplained phenomena.

While this is not the most well-researched opinion, I do think that an important part of horror mangas that really distinguishes the stories they tell is the suspense and style of unexplained phenomena. Suspense is just a good tool in all horror. Waiting for the scary monster is often what makes the monster so scary. But in horror manga, the scary monster/unexplained phenomena is extra unsettling because it does not stray completely from what we perceive as "normal". The recommended short-story from this week, The Story of Mimi-Hashi-Hoichi, mentioned crabs with human-faces on their backs. The Enigma played off our own narcissism and how people tend to react when something appears "made for them". And finally, the "sixth sense" mentioned in Homunculus is a concept that we are all generally aware of, but do not actually experience. All of these stories played with the average concept of "normality" to create a more captivating story.