The liminal zone

Beyond the countless corpses, Japanese manga auteur Ito's latest import deftly--and, of course, ever so gruesomely--highlights the liminal spaces between life and death, good and evil, waking and sleep. An engaged couple's innocent decision to "stop somewhere on a whim" during a trip leads to grave tragedy in "Weeping Woman Way." A manipulative, philandering boarding school principal finally gets deserved justice in "Madonna." A dying man gets caught up in "The Spirit Flow of Aokigahara," possibility achieving eternity. A serial killer manages to invade the dreams of an innocent neighbor in "Slumber." For the globally renowned creator of such intricate, detailed graphic horror on the page, Ito certainly seems to have quite an unexpectedly playful humility he tends to reveal in his afterwords. His confessions here include references to his own COVID-19 lockdown, his difficulty with keeping to page-count limits ("unbecoming of a professional," he readily admits), and being "out of good ideas." Readers need not worry: this quartet, smoothly translated into English by Allen, is another dare-not-read-alone-at-night delight.

Internationally renowned master of horror Ito (Deserter) returns with a collection of four new stories. In "Weeping Woman Way," a soon-to-be-married couple touring the countryside stumble across a village inhabited by women who believe it is their duty to weep uncontrollably at all times in order to help the recently deceased find peace in the afterlife. In "Madonna," students at an elite girls' Christian boarding school discover a disturbing connection between their stern headmaster's eerily intense wife and the strange rock formations decorating campus. A terminally ill man visits Mount Fuji's Sea of Trees determined to end his life on his own terms, only to be bizarrely transformed after encountering the local phenomena known as "The Spirit Flow of Aokigahara." "Slumber," the best and most viscerally disturbing story in this collection, features a young law student who comes to believe he is responsible for committing a series of gruesome murders in his sleep. VERDICT While this latest collection never quite manages to evoke the berserk emotional intensity of his best work, Ito's knack for crafting psychologically complex tales that veer between creeping dread and surrealistic body horror remains unparalleled.