“How Love Came to Professor Kirida” is another adaptation, this being a retelling of “How Love Came to Professor Guildea” by Robert Hichens, although it should be mentioned that in the manga the title is incorrectly rendered as “How Love Come to Professor Guildea”. After this is an autobiographical tale, “Master Umezz and Me”, in which Ito talks about his love for the horror mangaka Kazuo Umezz ( The Drifting Classroom) and how Ito was approached to make a manga adaptation of his film Mother.

This leads her to go as far as covering herself with deadly cyanide in order to stop her. A woman, Miko, becomes obsessed with stopping her after her fiancé and dog are both killed by the woman. Next is “The Licking Woman”, another body horror tale, this time concerning a woman with a vile tongue who licks people and poisons them to death. The narrator, Sano, explains of a scuffle between members of a UFO society set up by Mariko’s father, a doctor, after a new member claims to have been abducted by aliens, and since then, he has been unable to see Mariko up close, leading to panic that Mariko is perhaps really an alien. When her male friends come and see her, however, she appears to turn invisible before their eyes. The title story, “Venus in the Blind Spot”, concerns a girl, Mariko Shono, who is a UFO enthusiast. The stories Ito tells are a reimagining of Ranpo’s short “The Human Chair”, in which a woman novelist becomes convinced that there is a man hiding in her fancy writing chair, and “An Unearthly Love”, about a pair of newlyweds where the wife learns her husband is having an affair with someone… or rather something. For example, his novel The Fiend with Twenty Faces is where the gentleman thief ’20 Faces’ comes from, as in the secret identity of Akira Ijyuin in CLAMP’s Man of Many Faces and CLAMP School Detectives. At the same time, a strange radio programme airs, encouraging the “billions alone” to become more friendly with each other.Īfter that are two adaptations of stories by mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo – a man who has influenced more than one manga as it happens. The first seen is of two people, but the bodies rapidly mount up, including one twisted scene of sewn bodies being displayed as horrific decorations on Christmas trees.

At the same time, a series of killings takes place in which multiple people have been found naked with their bodies sown together with fishing lines. The opening story, “Billions Alone”, is one of Ito’s body horror standards, revolving around a hikikomori named Michio who re-encounters the woman who was the only one who defended him when they were at school. VIZ once again presents us with another collection of Junji Ito’s short works, and there is a real mixture in this collection: some new tales of horror, some previously released but now in colour, some based on the work of other writers, and one autobiographical tale. WARNING: This is a horror manga and as such some readers may find the content disturbing.

Venus in the blind spot