The Hanging Balloons

[cyberghostface]

Here's a story that makes you go "WTF" as Junji Ito only can.

Disclaimer: The original story was over 90 pages. This is 30. Remember to read right to left.

The story opens with the young protagonist shut in her house. She has been there for a week and has ran out of food.





Terumi was a celebrity and model but was also best friends with Kazuko. She left no suicide note but she had expressed to her parents misgivings about her celebrity life.

Kazuko later sees Terumi's ex-boyfriend Shiroshi being hounded by a group of Terumi's fans, blaming him for her suicide. Kazuko breaks it up. He later tells her that he feels guilty for what happened, saying that his nagging drove her to kill herself.






These are quickly deduced as mass hallucinations.





Shiroshi later tells Kazuko that he's seen the floating head outside of his house. He later calls her to see for herself.















She goes to the police but no one believes her.

The next day, her friends don't believe her either when they all notice shapes floating in the sky.




















Inside the house, the news reporter on the TV says that these floating heads are attacking Japan. He warns all viewers to stay inside their homes.

The father decides to leave for work, saying he'll safeguard his neck.





Yosuke, Kazuko's brother, says he needs to get food or else they'll starve. He brings an umbrella with him to ward off the heads.

Comments

[icon_uk]

Randomly horrible, but I'm afraid the deliberate lack of ANY explanation does tend to irk me after the fourth or fifth Junji Ito story.

And why she was stupid enough to open the window when she knows there's a things with her brother's voice out there, never mind he's speaking to her from outside an upstairs window is a little odd.

[aeka]

And why she was stupid enough to open the window when she knows there's a things with her brother's voice out there, never mind he's speaking to her from outside an upstairs window is a little odd.

This.

With regards to any explanation, like most other Japanese horror stories, I took this to mean that a curse was born after Terumi hung herself. Hence the ghost sightings, hence the floating heads, hence the death by hanging. :/

[icon_uk]

I guess I prefer my horror movie curses to be a little less... mindlessly sweeping. Give the villain a motivation, it can be a weird one if you like, make their targetting choices cruel, but give it some internal logic. This is close to "Rocks fall, everybody dies and we don't know why the rocks fell".

[aeka]

To me this feels like it fits the profile of onryou which is very characteristic of many kaidan stories in Japan. Admittedly though, the circumstances of her death aren't really explained in the scans provided, so we don't know what specifically drove Terumi to become a vengeful spirit in the story. There seems to be implication that her boyfriend may have had something to do with her death and probably the reason she killed him the way that she did, which is also a common theme of the genre.

[icon_uk]

Vengeful spirit is fine, killing the boyfriend is fine (Well, not "fine", but in context of a horror story), but taking revenge on hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with her own death isn't really revenge, it's just mindless mass slaughter. And the examples in the onryou link you gave seems to suggest a better targetted (if no less unfair) system of revenge; oathbreaking, petty obsession with clothing etc..

Even if she were targetting people who had been her fans there'd be a certain logic to it.

[aeka]

but taking revenge on hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with her own death isn't really revenge, it's just mindless mass slaughter.

The killing of others that had nothing to do with the person's death is what makes it a curse in the genre. If I recall correctly, just directing their anger at the source of those feelings when they died isn't necessarily enough to satisfy the spirit's thirst for revenge. Also the fact that it's supposed to be an evil, harmful entity means that it's no longer human purely motivated by human interest. Once a spirit becomes an onryou, it's only driving force is the strong emotions it died with and that's what causes them to do what they do. It's not something you can necessarily apply logic to. This was also the case with Sadako's character in Kouji Suzuki's Ring series.

[icon_uk]

Thanks, I appreciate the explanation.

I do find it odd that there's a genre which is quite so... downbeat. In The Ring the curse can be passed on so it skips over you, whereas in The Grudge, as in this story, there is no way to placate the onryou, or cancel out it's effects or defeat it.

If GK Chesterton's says of fairy stories “Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”, this genre seems to exist to tell us, "Not that ghosts exist, but that ghosts can ALWAYS FUND YOU AND KILL YOU HORRIBLY AND CAN NEVER BE STOPPED!!"

[cleome45]

Thanks for summing up better than I could why these tales often leave me unaffected, no matter how good they are technically.

Though I have had one close friend and one friend-of-friend who killed themselves. And I know that in some cases both severe depression and suicide run in families.

So I guess this can be interpreted as almost a metaphor for that, and I found it kind of moving in spite of myself.

[sharky_chan]

I think that's meant to be part of the horror of it. In The Grudge series, people are targeted for, like, knowing people who entered the house :|. I always interpreted it to be one of those "you can do everything right but it's still going to get you" things.

Of course, this story is still an extreme case, since apparently her curse wipes out everyone in Japan and possibly the world. I can't help wondering what all those floating balloon heads are gonna do now that everyone is dead. Like, have a big balloon dance party or something?

[icon_uk]

Yeah, and I REALLY didn't like The Grudge for that very reason.

[sharky_chan]

Completely fair :). I guess for me, I don't really like ultra-violence and I don't really like tales of revenge, so beyond those elements, the minutia are basically the same ^^.

[espanolbot]

I prefer Dark Water, that one at least has... sort of a happy ending for all concerned. Bitter sweet, I guess.

[sadoeuphemist]

It's the extension of the rash of copycat suicides at the start of the story. It's taken for granted that the suicide of a celebrity will spark a rash of copycats, and that the nation as a whole will be morbidly fixated on the gruesome details of the story: the protagonist speculates if the ragged edge of her neck came from the noose nearly tearing her head off. The story simply asks, what if the cycle doesn't stop, what if every subsequent suicide sets off a new wave until the whole thing hits critical mass.

The floating heads are clearly suicidal urges made flesh; they speak to you with your voice urging you to kill yourself. The protagonist is able to resist them when she can cling to the hope that her brother might be alive out there somewhere. It is the revelation of his death that leads to hers.

[auggie18]

Sorta creepy, but not as stomach-turning as the ice cream one. Which was the first one of these I read and it grossed me out of looking back for the other ones.


Why I opened this one...


...I don't know...

[gamerguy]

Now I'm curious; I don't know that one.

[lissa_quon]

http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/3795338.html - Ice Cream Bus is probably what they are talking about - it was posted not too long back.

[razsolo]

This one actually squicked me out more than the ice cream truck one....I thought this was kind of too silly to work up until the point where the four balloons came after the schoolgirls, and then that whole sequence I was like AHHH WTF TAKING HITS TO MY SANITY HERE *_*

[kraesil]

I kinda considered the ice cream one mild...

[auggie18]

Really? I ended up going back and reading the other ones and the ice cream one still freaks me out the most. I was actually sorta meh about the other ones...

(Though the old lady across the way was pretty creepy.)

[blackruzsa]

Ditto. It's like cartoon violence with the ice cream; no blood, no muss, no fuss.

This, on the other hand, freaked the fuck out of me when the floating heads started rallying and that one girl's head blew out.

[cleome45]

The ice cream one was ruined for me from the first couple of panels, because I just couldn't accept that so many parents would let their kids just ride around all day with a strange dude in the first place.

I guess if I were a parent, I'd be one of the mega-overprotective ones, at least by these standards.

[lucky_gamble]

Slightly creepy and kind of mindless. Not sure if that's good or bad. The fact that her curse or whatever it is is killing people not even involved in her death really...stinks? Again the story is entertaining but really has no explanation. Reminds me of an old Magic The Gathering card with the quote,
" Play no favorites. Everybody dies."

[leoboiko]

“Funny Gurn Ballons”, by Junji Ito.

I think this story is kind of a random sketch or purposeless play by the writer (“let’s do baloon things that want to hang everyone… yeah). I rather like it because it’s so pointless.

[rainspirit]

God, the faces. :(

[lissa_quon]

....My brain has just combined this with Billy's Balloon and now I'm laughing. I think there's something wrong with me.

[rainspirit]

Oh god, not the Red Balloon?

You monster. :|

[lissa_quon]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rag-RGSYq6I - you mean this balloon?

Yes I know, I've been called many things, monster is indeed one of them.

[rainspirit]

Oh no, I actually meant this balloon. But it looks like Don might've taken inspiration from it, so!

Old childhood memories. *_*

[cypherfdp]

Way to open the window without even looking out of it first. How do you manage doing that?

EDIT: Sorry, I'm dumb and didn't realize the window was... fogged? I guess?

[silverzeo]

.... THE FUDGE!?!?! This a horror? Why? It started out fine, a dead girl ghost haunting her ex kinda of deal. Then swarms balloon voodoo heads came out of nowhere and doing all this BS... WHY? ARE THEY GRIMM REAPERS? ARE THEY WHAT CARRY SOULS INTO HEAVEN? YOU NEED REASONING TO BE SCARY! This make Monster A-Go-Go seem legit!
I'm more mad at the stupid writing than the graphics of this.
Axe Cop wouldn't be this random...

[sadoeuphemist]

I'm surprised that so many people think this is random, the story is almost didactic in explaining everything logically: the disembodied head is because her head was nearly detached because of the noose, the numerous sightings mirror the public's fascination with her suicide and the specter her death casts over them. The heads are the embodiment of suicidal urges, the boyfriend dies because Terumi died, and so on ad infinitum. The protagonist only opens the window (eg: kills herself) once she hears her dead brother calling out to her.

[icon_uk]

Not random, so much as annoying unexplained.

The "The heads are the embodiment of suicidal urges" argument works if one accepts that everyone has suicidal urges that strong, but the singular lack of mass suicides from the general population (and the reluctance of the people in this story specifically to die willingly) sort of proves that that isn't the case. The heads may talk about suicides, but they themselves perform homicides.

[sadoeuphemist]

Of course, because by the end the suicidal impulse has been separated and made flesh. The boyfriend more or less kills himself, and that is the tipping point where the ghostly heads (suicidal urges) take on a life of their own. You're acting like suicidal ideation isn't something people struggle with and can be tormented by in real life.

And random and unexplained add up to the same thing, a lack of a coherent logic behind events. But everything is perfectly logical here, and there are pages devoted to the TV news speculating on the logistics of what's going on.

[silverzeo]

And the part with if you pop the balloon head, your head deflates too? What does that mean?

[sadoeuphemist]

The balloons are you. You are the balloon. They are one and the same thing.

[silverzeo]

But how does that fit in with what you said earlier, that they were like manifestation of people's suicide thoughts they had after the celebrity killed herself? I can see that it follows the same rules as Paranoia Agent, like how Lil Slugger was brought up by that girl as form of desperation to shift blame from herself for her dog's death and then latter on her life when she was underpressure to make a cartoon based of her dog. But the key factor in that was that she was SO DESPERATE, that Slugger became real. And you can even say it fellow the rules of "Believe in fairies are real to make them real" logic too, as the rumors and followings may have lead to that... but then how did those balloons for Kazuko and her friends came to be? It was one thing to think of them as other head balloons, but as their OWN?!?

The story would have been better if it just ended with the boyfriend hanging
"himself", everything else seems like something from a filler arc. There is still so many questions left unanswered...

[sadoeuphemist]

What do you mean? Your suicidal thoughts are part of you. Only you can make yourself commit suicide.

I've never watched Paranoia Agent, so I have no idea what you're talking about there. But if you believe that the boyfriend can hang himself from his own suicidal thoughts, you can extend that to the rest of the nation. This makes sense to you as a private thing, where a man is tormented by his dead girlfriend. But it's not a private thing: the woman was a celebrity, it's all over the news, everyone has their own reactions and fixations and memories of the deceased. It's the same thing, only on a nationwide scale.

[silverzeo]

Now wait, if the balloons are suicidal thoughts are part of you... then how can someone else who "pops" the balloon also kill the person too? Isn't that like how a friend actually stopping from committing suicide; but here, it kills the girl in a more gruesome fate than being hanged?

Yes. But just the thing. The boyfriend's death was only seen by the protagonist girl, right? She was the first and only one to see noose-balloon. But are we really expecting to believe that just telling that story to people who didn't believe her MADE them REAL? She told them to the police and her school chums; and the balloons didn't appear until right after she told the girls. So how does that work? In fact, it's starting to sound like that on bad monster movie, where this monster was killing people in order for people to believe in it and make him real, but ends up framing a girl instead. That, or that weird Silent Hill plot about the town turning into a killer because of Silent Hill so more people will know about it, which is good for it for some reason? Basically, I find that the logic behind both those 2 and this make no sense. It WOULD if the celebrity who committed suicide did it because she felt like no one knows the real her or something and wanted everyone who knew her to die too.

[sadoeuphemist]

How do you kill a thought without killing the person? You can prevent a person from committing suicide, from performing the physical act, but you can't just put a crossbow to their head and shoot the suicidal thoughts out of their brain.

The balloons do not start showing up because belief in them makes them real, I have no idea how you got this idea. The balloons are suicidal urges. More people begin getting suicidal urges as suicides start getting more and more publicized in the news, as more people they know commit suicide. Japan in general has a cultural problem with suicide:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan
The balloons start showing up not because of the motives of the original celebrity, but because the widespread news of her suicide stirs up a lot of already-existing cultural problems. For example, a major cause of suicide for men in Japan has to do with economic problems, so it's not a coincidence that the father dies trying to get to work, and that the brother dies trying to provide food for the family.

[silverzeo]

Okay that makes some sense, like the whole "treat the symptoms, kill the patient" kinda deal in some situations. It like a zen riddle, killing suicidal thoughts deflate and kills the person who thinks them...

I got that idea from what I was trying to get from the scene. Like those things in the distance were were just normal balloons but then the protagonist thought they were more heads then made the girls think so to and lead them to create their own death balloons. I don't need to be reminded of the whole japan suicide deal... SOuth Park did an episode about it.

Okay. I can see the reasoning behind that.. but what about all the other murder and suicide in history, the more tragic ones. Like Elvis Presley or JFK... now I wonder what happens if a suicidal bomber is in Japan at that time (that makes me sick, doesn't it?), how come their deaths, even the ones that actually bring death to others, just stop there but a city turns into a horror state in a month because of a teenage celebrity? I still can't buy that one teen celebrity's death brings forth balloon death to all of Japan, it seems like an jump the shark deal...

[sadoeuphemist]

Eh? You just said earlier the story would make sense if the celebrity wanted everyone who knew her to die too. That's giving a single person the power to murder Japan just because she wills it. In the story as it is now, she is simply the trigger that sets off an already dysfunctional society.

Your complaint is true of all ghost and horror stories, though. If ghosts and slashers and so on are created by violent tragic deaths, the world should be constantly beset by war ghosts and abused children ghosts and so on so forth. Freddy Kruger gets to come back as a dream demon slasher, but Hitler stays dead, go figure.

[silverzeo]

I meant that she would have her own image be haunted. Kinda like how ghosts haunts their killers, in this story, she killed herself from the pressure of being a celebrity, most of which because her large fanbase in the city.

I kinda meant that whole suicidal urges bring the balloons part. Those deaths brought alot despair to people, but it one teen idol that brings forth means of people committing suicide via balloons to wipe out an entire city if not the nation or the world... I mean, Freddy was confined to the children of the people who killed him and to those who remembered him, he doesn't go into the dreams of everyone everywhere at one go, right?

[cleome45]

This make Monster A-Go-Go seem legit!

I just snickered into my coffee cup. Now I have coffee all over my eyeglasses. I hope you're happy.

[crinos]

INCOMING MESSAGE FROM THE BIG GIANT HEAD!


Sorry, I'm sorry everyone, just had to say it.

[dejadrew]

Oh, salarymen. Sure, there are killer balloon creatures homisuiciding everyone in sight, but I MUST GO TO WORK! Take the day OFF?! That's just UNTHINKABLE!

[cleome45]

I was scolded once for not returning to work while suffering a 102 F fever from the flu.

Sadly, the dude trying to get to work while surrounded by killer monsters is the actually least preposterous part of the story.

[kraesil]

I forgot about the don't read this before bed rule...