Itou Junji: Collection – 08

Well, that was pretty dark all the way around.  What springs to mind to me is that Junji-sensei must have one immense (and twisted) imagination, because he comes up with some pretty weird and grotesque stuff.

Any story involving the “human caterpillar” theme is bound to be gross (it’s a horror favorite) but the twist in this one certainly caught me by surprise.  Risa-san has lost her memories, and she has a recurring nightmare of a giant caterpillar entering her room.  She’s not wrong to associate this with her boyfriend, even if she can’t remember just what the association is.  Needless to say the guy’s family is hiding something, but I confess I didn’t see what that actually was coming.  That takes the term “head of the family” to another and entirely disgusting level.

Next up was a rather violent and depressing story about a circus where the talent is quite literally working without a net.  I don’t know how people haven’t figured out yet that circuses are evil just generally speaking, there was certainly a note of Kuroshitsuji to this one.  This one was dark, but it didn’t have the visceral creep-out factor of the first – it was mostly just a parade of death with seemingly no underlying meaning to it.

Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens – 07

I confess I was beginning to drift a bit with Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens, but this episode was a rather nice return to form.  I like the arcs here that are a bit more character-focused and not so cavalier about killing – and which keep the slapstick to a relative minimum.  And this one definitely qualified.

I hadn’t necessarily thought of Enokida-san as one of the more interesting characters in this peanut gallery, and wasn’t really that keen to see his backstory – but it ended up being a pretty engaging one.  Turns out he’s the son of a politician (politicians generally seem to be the bad guys in this story) – a Diet member who ordered his (ex-hitman) butler to kill his son after his hacking escapades caused huge public embarrassment during an election campaign.  The butler took pity on the boy and pretended to kill him, instead sending him off to Hakata with instructions to hook up with his (presumably) underworld contacts if (when) he got in trouble.

This is all tied into an admittedly tangled story about hacking in all shapes and sizes, with Saitou being framed by a local hacker for a lark and the dark group “M3” putting out a hit list on all hackers talented enough to potentially cause them trouble.  That includes Enokida-san, who’s going by the name “Black Leg” and is worth 5 million Yen to M3. M3 seems like a generally evil bunch, so at some point soon here I would expect Banba-san to face them down head-on.  For now the priority will be saving Enokida, who has himself been hacked and now can’t be online without broadcasting his GPS coordinates to the world.  A hacker without a computer is useless, of course – or is the whole point that Enokida is about to prove that wrong?