The 2018 series Junji Itô: Korekushon translated selected examples of Junji Ito’s horror manga into anime, the core series having 12, roughly 24-minute, episodes each containing two segments. The anime is available in Japanese and dubbed into English but, despite a couple of segments that fit to the blog, I decided that reviewing the series as a whole was probably not the way forward. Rather, I’d look at pertinent segments as short films in their own right.
Interestingly this was one of the most overtly vampire related stories by Junji Ito, of the ones I have been thus far exposed to, and as one would expect it is remarkably inventive, creating a wonderfully weird trope within it. As such I will fairly much spoil the story to explore it.
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| the boys |
We meet Ansai and Kana after a car incident that leaves them broken down (off road for some unexplained reason). They walk through a forested area looking for help, especially a phone so they can call for a mechanic. They eventually come across a shelter under which a group of boys sit, the boys seem grey-eyed and somehow off. They ask them is they have a phone and they say no and are generally unhelpful, though they quietly snigger at the adults.
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| fangs |
As the couple walk away, looking for a town or road, Kana hears something and realises that the boys are following them. They turn to face them and one of the boys runs at them, managing to whip Kana across the face with a thorny vine, cutting her skin, before being pushed away by Ansai. The boys rush them, their mouths fanged. We then see the aftermath, the boys gone but Kana bleeding at the leg, face and neck. She suggests that her blood was licked and one of the boys bit her and it seems the same biting occurred to Ansai though the wound is never concentrated upon.
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| the man |
They reach a village but it seems deserted. There is red splattering up walls that Kana hopes is paint. They find a puddle of blood with something, like a piece of fleshy matter, in the puddle. Ansai is still hopeful that they might find at least a single resident still living there and they do. Invited into his house, he binds Kana’s wounds and, though he has no phone, offers them a place to stay for the night.
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| the fruit sprouts |
He also tells them the story of his lover – a woman he claims Kana reminds him of. Though he loved her dearly, she was depressed, convinced he and everyone else wanted to abandon her. She even claimed that her blood wanted to leave her and eventually slit her own throat. The man grabbed her and drank from the cut and, subsequently, branches grew from it and the fruit appeared. The round fruit containing her blood and the more fruit grew the more she was drained to a husk. The fruit became the last thing he had of her.
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| the villager |
The couple go to bed but Ansai awakens and Kana is not there. He goes looking for her and finds a room full of bushes containing fleshy fruit. The man appears, saying this is all he has left of his love, and Ansai demands to know where Kana is. The man denies knowledge, suggesting she should be in their room and exits. Before he leaves, Ansai hears someone pleading for help. He sees the dishevelled body, almost mummified, of a man from whom one of the bushes grows. He tells Ansai that the man had come to their village and spread this strange plague, planting the villagers there as a blood crop – we have, here, a unique take on the blood farm concept that appears in the genre from time to time. Ansai finds Kana and tells her they must leave, the man seems calm about this, simply saying that they will be back.
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| those who ate their own fruit |
In a flashback to the conversation with the villager/bush, we see him telling Ansai that the one way to prevent becoming a bush, once it has sprouted (it is implied that the bush grows from the location of a vampire bite), is to eat all of its fruit yourself. However, that changes the feeder into one who thirsts endlessly for blood, including the blood of others. It is clear at this point that the boys from the beginning where not only from the village but had done this to themselves. Once again a Junji Ito story treads in unusual, dark spaces and this leaves us with an unusual vampire tale.
The episode's imdb page is here.
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK
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