Slug Girl

[cyberghostface]

 

Read from right to left.




Rie later visits Yuuko in her home to see that she is in bed wearing a mask. Yuuko tells her to go away. Later...








Her parents try everything including putting salt in her mouth but nothing works. Yuuko grows weaker as she is unable to eat. Eventually her parents fill the tub with salt and bring Yuuko into it.

Comments

[donnblake]

I don't know, I guess I can see the effectiveness of "awful things happen pretty randomly," as a horror device, but a lot of Junji Ito's stuff is too lacking in a framework to relate to what's happening. Not all of it- the one with the holes in the cliffs managed to be tantalizing with the dreams of what they represented, and the one with the Witch in the mutating house next door didn't really need more explanation, but something like this- her tongue becomes a slug, and then waaay too much salt, and then headsnail. Wut?

[silverzeo]

Well, slugs feed on water... and they kind of ruin crops too right. So I guess the snail represents Yuuko well because she is...chatty... and slugs are slow and silent....
....
....
Can someone bring in Orancitizen from "Brows Held High" to figure this out?

[sadoeuphemist]

Yuuko is an initially chatty girl who suddenly became quiet, and is described as "getting too lazy to talk." The sudden personality shift, combined with the slug imagery, suggests Yuuko has succumbed to apathy, and that the slug is a symbol of depression. It is a part of herself that she loathes and is disgusted by, but one that she cannot separate from herself. She starts isolating herself at home. She tries to 'cure' herself by taking up scissors and self-mutilating, but of course it ultimately doesn't help. She gradually stops eating. Her parents, worried for their little girl, eventually try an extreme stunt, submerging her in salt until they get scared they've suffocated her. In the end, the 'slug' takes over entirely, Yuuko is nothing more than a shell with a sad gaze.

[brooms]

that top image would make a really pretty tattoo.

[icon_uk]

Whilst acknowledging the ultimate subjectivity of aesthetics, I have to ask... in what way would a tattoo of a slug be pretty?

[brooms]

in the same way the art is pretty (to me). i like high contrast colorless tattoos.

[shadowpsykie]

O_O

[mrosa]

That last picture just chilled me!

[blackruzsa]

1) HARRY POTTER! (I'm sorry, but it had to be said)
2) This is probably not much better, but didn't the same thing happen in Uzumaki? Except they turned into full on giant snails? And we got the delight of seeing hermaphroditic snail sex?

[hazmat]

Yeah, some people in the town turned into snails. One boy, then the boy who bullied him, then a teacher.

Then later in the story cycle anyone caught outside who moved slowly for a long time was in danger of turning into a snail.

And other people would eat them.

Yes.

[blackruzsa]

I found that, compared to all the other things that happened in Uzumaki, funny and sweet.
Yeah, Uzumaki really messed me up. At least it had background, though. Or a running theme.

[cypherfdp]

"Junji Ito scans? And ew, about slugs? Not going to click not going to click not going to click-- DAMN IT! UGH!"

[silverzeo]

....... the flying f' is this? Why does this stuff just keep on happening to people at random, especially to school girls in Japan?

It's a weird-@$$ urban legend horror story, I'll give that. Goodness knows we had plenty of those in the States for some time.

But you know what made them actually scary? They have reasoning to them. Poetic Irony! Why is does she become a shell for a snail? Is because she hates slugs so much she kills a colony of them? Does she envy them? Explain, manga, EXPLAIN!

[cyberghostface]

Well some of the pages I cut out show that she was scared of slugs since a childhood incident and that slugs have been pestering her family's garden.

[espanolbot]

I think that it's best to just approach it like it was an EC Comic like Tales of the Crypt or something. Sometimes the weird crap can be explained as karmic punishment for some overt vice that the main character might be displaying, other times it's just unpleasant things happening to people because they're just unlucky.

Kind of like the difference between someone who routinely shoplifts finding that someone's been coming into their house house while they're out and stealing random things, and someone accidentally getting run over by a bus.

The first example is, as I said, a kind of macabre karmic story, the second is more an example of being just having really crap luck.

Sometimes in horror the people deserve it, for example, the people in the Mummy obliquely deserve to be attacked by Imhotep for desecrating an ancient tomb for profit AND accidentally releasing an immortal undead sorcerer to the bargin. Others it's just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or just knowing the wrong people, in the case of the Grudge or the Woman in Black for example.

[janegray]

I wouldn't say that desacrating a tomb of a person who died thousands of years ago deserves the death penality. And releasing the sorcerer was an accident, as you said, thus even less punishable.

[mrosa]

Who cares about poetic irony? I just love random horror striking innocent people, like in the real world :)

[gamerguy]

I think that's most of the point of his stories: there is no explanation and there never will be. The world is a totally random place where the innocent suffer just horribly as the guilty, and it can strike anyone at any time. Just random senseless tragedy, with no point at all. To many people, the very idea that the world is a random place is totally horrifying: there never will BE an explanation for all the terrible things that happen because there isn't one. I think that's what he tries to get across in his horror.

[md84]

The lack of reasoning makes this story less scary, but way more depressing. Apparently in the world of Junji Ito's works, it's possible for ordinary and relatively decent people to suddenly become the victims of horrible supernatural events without any warning and no explanation.

[espanolbot]

As I said above, it's kind of a case of the people inhabitting his stories being really damn unlucky most of the time, instead of genuinely deserving this stuff as happens a lot of the time in horror.

The idea that something like this could happen to someone, even an innocent schoolgirl, for seemingly no reason makes it, in theory, more scary.

[stolisomancer]

It's not exactly him so much as it's Japanese horror in general.

Western horror tends to dwell heavily on crime and punishment; anything bad that happens to somebody in a Western horror movie or story tends to happen to them because of something they did. This isn't always the case, of course, and there's a fair amount of material where somebody's just in the wrong place at the wrong time (most of the examples thereof are by Stephen King, now that I think about it), but it's a good majority of the genre.

Witness, for example, the slasher movie. Usually the victims go someplace that they know is haunted or cursed, they do something dumb, and they're killed for it. The person or persons to survive the movie do so by being smarter or more overtly virtuous than the rest.

J-horror, on the other hand, is very comfortable with the notion that no one is safe. The best example of that is with the Ju-On films, where a wide variety of people are murdered by an angry ghost, simply because they know the protagonist. Pulse is another good one, where the horrible sin they commit is "having a cell phone." Part of J-horror is the notion that you can do everything in your life absolutely correctly and it won't matter.

There's a pretty funny riff on this in The Cabin in the Woods, but discussing it in detail would involve spoilers.

[eyz]

part-terrifying, part-intriguing, part-interesting, and a tiny bit funny due to its oddness, but that's just me~

'Reminded me of one of those monsters in Berserk.

[tessiebee]

It's a cultural thing isn't it?

Compare Bloody Mary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Mary_(folklore)) with Kuchisake-onna (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuchisake-onna). One is called up, the other just happens to you!

[espanolbot]

I'm sure that there was a monster that was invisible, doorshaped and stood around for people to walk into what they said was empty space, injuring their noses.

[jaysonbyron]

I love scrolling through my feed reader and seeing a lovely Junti Ito preview image waiting for me to click through. It's like it's saying, "Hi, I'm here to ruin your morning, you're gonna love it."

That last panel, where her hair is spiraling like a snail's shell? -Awesome-.