I feel like I’m starting to get a little bit of a sense for who It0 Junji is as a writer.  Admittedly we’re only two episodes (and four “collection” entries) in, but there’s a distinct personality emerging – even as this week’s tales were quite different (and considerably more horrifying) than the first.

Foremost, I think Ito-sensei is clearly a guy with a dark sense of humor – as indeed so many of the best horror writers are.  Neither of this week’s chapters were as comedic as last week’s “Curse Boy” number, but the first one – featuring a guy who has premonitions of terrible things happening, and is set off by a hideous photo in a fashion magazine – was absurd enough to be pretty funny on purpose.  I mean, the idea that “Fuchi” would ever get into a fashion magazine in the first place is hilariously silly to begin with, but when she ate the moeblob…  That was precious.

That tale was kind of scary in the end, for all its ludicrousness, but the “Long Dreams” chapter was by far the creepiest of the four we’ve seen so far. This was a classic, straight-up horror story, extremely unsettling and not whimsical in the slightest.  The idea here is that a young man is having “long dreams” – while only a night passes in the “real” world, in his mind far more time goes by, and it’s forever increasing (this is kind of a nightmare take on Star Trek’s magnificent “The Inner Light” episode).  Eventually the young man’s appearance starts to change, much to the horror of Mami-kun – a young female patient who’s terrified of dying and is convinced the terrifying presence she sees in the halls is a Shinigami.

This is scary on its own terms, what with the way the man checks out, and the fact that the doctor injects the crystals he finds in his brain into Mami-chan.  But what’s really unnerving about this is where it forces the mind to go – a fear of death is the most fundamental human terror there is, but the notion of living what feels like a lifetime in a dream is both frightening and somehow plausible.  Did the doctor do Mami a kindness – or did he sentence her to a fate worse than the death she feared?  This one will stay with me a bit, and that makes me anxious to see what Ito-sensei has in store for us next week.