Master of Horror Manga Returns With ‘Moan’

Last year, Junji Ito fans got a rude shock when the long-awaited Uzumaki adaptation finally slithered onto Adult Swim and — despite years of hype — fell flat. Luckily, Ito himself never stopped producing nightmares, with his stand-alone graphic short stories creeping slowly but surely westward in translation as ominously as the terrors represented in his infamously eerie line work. While the Japanese equivalent of Moan in the Masterpiece Collection (volume 8 of 12) came out in 2013, the translation from VIZ Media only came out this month.

Moan
By Junji Ito
Translated by Jocelyne Allen
VIZ Media; 272 pages

Moan belongs squarely within Ito’s continuum of dread. Despite the age of these stories, published in manga magazines even earlier than the Masterpiece Collection, their terror hasn’t aged a day. Ito’s horrors tend to emerge suddenly, unmotivated by logic, their menace made worse by how little explanation accompanies them. “Supernatural Transfer Student,” the opener, begins in a rural school’s ghost-hunting club before a too-cheerful newcomer shows up — his good manners as unnerving as the phenomena surrounding him.

Short stories suit Ito’s sensibility. His characters rarely evolve; they endure. They are witnesses, not heroes, left to guess how much attention to pay to forces that may obliterate them — or ignore them entirely. When murder does occur, it’s often at human hands, though obsession and madness blur the line between the natural and supernatural.

Take the eponymous story “Moan” which features as its villain the hideous Numei. Or is he just dirty? It’s hard to tell because the stalker is drawn with strange stylized pock marks on his face (and somehow even his clothes) with eyes and teeth in obviously wrong proportions compared to the more normal looking characters. Does Numei actually look so awful, or are the heroines of this tale so naturally repulsed by any sort of filth that he merely looks so grotesque to them? That the characters themselves aren’t entirely sure is one of many factors delaying them in realizing that they are, indeed, in a horror story, rather than mere domestic drama.

That blurred line fuels the best stories here. Ito’s scariest figures aren’t always the grotesques — whether Numei or the feral children of “Blood Orb Grove” — but the seemingly sane: the anxious mother or the avuncular benefactor whose calm reason masks delusion. The most frightening monsters in Moan are the ones who think they’re being reasonable.

In “Flesh-Colored Mystery,” Ito once again traps a well-meaning teacher in an insoluble situation: a child compelled to destroy everything on a wall. We know, from the volume’s earlier tales, that her curiosity will not save her. Ito’s art — cracked eyes, chalk-pale faces — builds tension through incremental unease rather than splatter. A single bald child among smiling kindergarteners is enough to set the skin crawling long before the horror breaks loose.

The final two stories, “Near Miss” and “Under the Ground,” are tighter and more conventional, their twists almost perfunctory. They close the volume on a whimper rather than a wail. Ito’s best work — like “Blood Orb Grove” or “Flesh-Colored Mystery” — thrives when there’s room for dread to spread out, not merely snap shut.

Ito’s horror isn’t about mythos or monsters you can franchise. There’s no Kraken or Gojira, no hidden lore to decode, no cosmic logic to master. His worlds are indifferent engines of cruelty, where every explanation is partial and every ending arbitrary. The terror lies in that refusal to resolve.

Twelve years later and in a brand new English translation by Jocelyne Allen who translated Itp’s Eisner Award-winning Frankenstein, Ito’s stories still hum with that same eerie vibration — the sound of the universe moaning back, even as we hope against all hope that maybe the pipes are just dirty.

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