The Dark Drinks Blood

[cyberghostface]

Here's another Junji Ito story just in time for the Halloween season. Remember to read from right to left. This is 1/3 of the story.

As a warning, eating disorders factor into this story.

The story opens with a young girl named Nami who became anorexic after she was unable to get a date.






Nami wakes with blood on her mouth and the pillows and assumes she had the dream because she vomited in her sleep.

The next morning she meets a boy in her school named Tani. He tells her that she's been worrying people with her weight loss and that he's there to help her if she needs it. She pushes him away.

Nami has another dream with the hand and the blood and wakes up with the dirty sheets. She's become even more depressed, not being able to lose the weight she wanted to. She runs into Tani again only this time he's a lot more skinny.





He tells her he's doing it because he likes her. Eventually she finds herself drawn to him.




He brings her to his shed where she discovers...










Pero spits blood at her; disgusted, Nami flings the bat away from her. Tani tells her that he was just trying to help.




She runs away but he chases after her.




The bats begin lapping blood from the severed limbs and vomiting it elsewhere as if they were attempting to circulate blood to revive him.




She faints and wakes up in the hospital bed, covered in little cuts. She recognizes them as bites from the vampire bats. Back at home, the bats appear at her window and in her room. She runs outside where they lead her to the sound of Tani's voice.





The bats draw tracks in the sky and she eventually finds its location.






Just like that, the giant bat flies into the sky disappears into the darkness with the other bats following.



 

Comments

[theepicbeyond]

I found Junji Ito through scans daily, and read the Uzumaki series. I still can't look at snails without getting a little weirded out ha ha lol.

I like this. It's a different take on the Vampire love story trope. Creepy and kinda gross as vampires should be.

[blackruzsa]

Was it the hermaphroditic sex or the fact that they were eaten by other people?
For me, it was the latter.

Someone should post Uzumaki *nudgenudgewink* :D

[theepicbeyond]

Ha ha it was a friend's copy of Uzumaki I'll see if i can get it.

The Hermaphroditic sex was the shallow end of the pool as far as the snails go. It barely phased me. The body horror of people mutating is what got me. They were loosing their minds as they got their legs merged together, and their eyes bulged out of their sockets.

when the snails were being hunted and eaten dialed it up to 11. I was on the edge of my seat when the heroes of the story were running from the cannibals as the little boy mutated.

I finished reading the whole thing and i couldn't help but wonder if the spiral had driven me a little mad. Ha ha ha

[blackruzsa]

Same. I think it was the eating of the snails and the cochlea bit that really got to me.

Still, it was a good read.

[silverhammerman]

That was strange, but I definitely prefer it to his "bad things happen to regular people for no reason with explanation whatsoever" work.

[greenmask]

I'm so jealous of how Ito's drawings all look exactly right.

[apintrix]

Really? I agree his artwork is masterfully creepy, but I was going to post that I'm starting to get a bit tired of his drawings! He basically only has one face for every heroine he draws...

(Of course, that's... not exactly an ununsual problem.)

[greenmask]

Hah! Well, that's true. But there aren't always more than one woman per story (different but related problem..), so I don't notice.

[cyberghostface]

*shrugs* I'd say his people look similar in general, boy and girl alike.

And IMO if there's not much women in a story, it's because there's not much people period. Often a story will just have one or two major characters (like this one). But a lot if not most of his works have female protagonists.

[greenmask]

It's true. Low character counts are good for suspense and there are a lot of female protagonists (there's a lot to say about woman-as-victim but Ito doesn't horrify me as a female before he horrified me as a human).

I don't have the same impression of male face similarity but I haven't made a study of it.

[captainbellman]

His storytelling is astounding as well - more than any contemporary author, I'd call him a successor to Poe. The last page of this story is hauntingly familiar in its similarity to that of "The Masque of the Red Death" - the inversion of blood, the liquid of life, into a grim symbol of death, coupled with the loneliness of the final figure in a universe overshadowed by the inevitability of decay and doom.

All rather pleasant.

[greenmask]

Oh, round of applause, well put.

[captainbellman]

Oh, really? Many thanks. The perks of being a literature graduate.

[blackruzsa]

When his works have a lot of characters, the facial features are all different, so he's not guilty of anime-style sameface :) But yeah, it's true that his main characters mostly look the same, which in my opinion is okay, since they're in separate titles anyway.

[sinisterlink]

This was the first Junji Ito story I ever read. Ah, memories. I remember reading it and thinking, "Hmm. That's messed up". If I only knew how much worse Ito could get. lol

[kiev4am]

Oh god, every time I tell myself I probably shouldn't click the Junji Ito link. And yet I always do, just to see how badly it's going to creep me out. Brrr :/

[blackruzsa]

I liked this story in a way, and felt sorry for the bat guy ); I mean, creepy he was, but he cared.

Plus, he died 'cause of the girl. :{ Poor dude.

Still. Creepy.

But I won't lie, I was super excited to see another Ito post.

[cyberghostface]

Well he didn't die, he just ended up turning into a giant bat, which for him is probably a happy ending.

[blackruzsa]

True, true, but still... getting run over by a train ):

[captainbellman]

I...believe he did a similar one, which was just about the guy starving himself to shock the girl into getting help? I saw it on s_d somewhere. Presumably Ito read it over and muttered "...Nah, too touching. Needs bats."

[icon_uk]

"...Nah, too touching. Needs bats."

Well, haven't we all been there?

[captainbellman]

Wherever 'there' is, I'm betting a certain Mr. Duke is probably raising a cocktail glass and rolling up a twenty-dollar bill.

Also - my mistake. An older post on s_d included a bunch of pages from the story BEFORE it turns all Romanian, leading me to believe it was an earlier, innocent variation. The original poster had circumvented s_d rules by leaving out the twist and inviting readers to seek it out on our own.

[icon_uk]

That's not circumventing s_d rules (or at least none I'm familiar with), that's in the best spirit of us encouraging comic book sales!

[sadoeuphemist]

This is amazing, it's a Nice Guy vampire. Instead of drinking people's blood, he forces them to drink his.

[janegray]

Well, I guess this is as close to a happy ending as Ito's stories can get. The guy turned into a bat (which, considering how he loved bats, isn't all that sad) and the girl is physically unharmed and might have been successfully shocked into asking for help (at the very least, people at the hospital might have noticed that she was severely undernourished).

Plus, I appreciate any story that points out that vampire bats really are good animals that take care of each other. The part about vampire bats sharing food with other hungry bats is 100% true.

[biod]

An Ito story where the two characters walk away as mostly traumatised and a happy bat respectively is pretty much a win.

[biod]

As upbeat and tame this is for an Ito story, that vampire face still gives me the heebie-jeebies.

[sindra]

...and he probably came and visited her window....every night.....as a giant bat....making sure she was taking care of herself. Because he would if she didn't.

That's how it ends in my mind, anyway.