Week 9: Banana Fish & Junji Ito's Shiver

I read a bit of Banana Fish, it feels like a detective drama that I can imagine appeals to female audiences. However, I'm spending most of my time reading Junji Ito's work to prepare for my presentation.This week I read Shiver, a collection of short stories. In Used Record, the story takes a turn for the worse rather quickly. An enchanting record, later revealed to be a dead singer's death rattle, curses the carrier. This causes hysteria in small circles where people kill to obtain the record. Ito says he was inspired to create this story because of a small record shop he lived by in Nagoya. Used Record uses some conventions I talked about that Ito utilizes, but on a smaller scale. Fashion Model is just a visual feast of disgust.

Hanging Blimp was one of my favorites and I'll be talking about it during my presentation. It's about floating heads, dopplegangers of humans from below, that await to hang their helpless doubles. They moan their own names from the sky; searching for their human companions, all while having have dead expressions on their faces. This story felt melancholic because of the progression of the mass hysteria, as it affected personal groups of people like families. It feels like a commentary on how suicide affects people, as the Japan in the story was made aware of the floating heads after a series of copycat suicides kept happening.

The Long Dream is another great one, more Lovecraftian in nature, though, as it relies more on ideas than gore to instill terror. A man is afflicted with a disorder where he falls asleep, and as every dream passes, he feels it becomes longer even though it's only been a night in real-time. He begins to have dreams that feel as though they've lasted months, and they're often terrifying and unimaginable in nature. The man begs the doctor to help him not-sleep. This unsettling cycle begins to affect the man's appearance, and his wife, who is also sick but with a cancer, cannot recognize him. Eventually, the man turns into dust and fades away. The Long Dream was a specifically scary read because of it's discussion of "real time vs. subjective time" as Ito called it. To imagine being stuck in a dreamland, only to awake 8 hours later is beyond human imagination, and definitely worth a read.