scans_daily | The Hanging Balloons

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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?

The Hanging Balloons

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