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

[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.

[crinos]

That's actually a pretty interesting analysis.

Hmm....

[silverzeo]

Yeah, I question what "home remedy" would be to dunk your entire body in a tub full of salt and then pour water on her to make her better again...

Another story about depression? First those hanging head-balloons and now slug tongues... I know depression is a serious problem to all teenagers in generals... but you think instead of having the character meet a horrible end, could there be at least one who manages to overcome them? I mean, I know animes can be filled with cheap turn arounds and deus ex machinas, but having the exact opposite of portrayal of life isn't exactly health either... some people actually do get over traumas and depression... there is a reason why in most horror stories there is a bad@$$ who is sick of running in fear, gears-up, and get ready for a fight for their lives!

Re: Hmm....

[sadoeuphemist]

You should quit reading Junji Ito, then. His protagonists don't really fight, they more of succumb. Take his most popular story on the internet, the Enigma of Amigara Fault. In that, the only supernatural element is a bunch of holes in a wall. All you need to do to stay safe is to not go into a hole.

Spoiler alert: everyone goes into the goddamned holes.

[icon_uk]

But what's the cause and what's the effect.

I was reading it as the "getting too lazy to talk" being an effect of the slug, not a cause.

[sadoeuphemist]

It doesn't really matter. Are you depressed because you're isolated from people, or are you isolated from people because you're depressed? It all ends up as a vicious cycle anyway. You can view things deterministically and say that there must be a specific cause for every effect, but it's not as if the average person will be able to objectively trace back the chain of events and figure out where exactly their lives started to go wrong.

[icon_uk]

In this case it makes a lot of difference: Is she depressed because she was a perfectly normal, chatty girl who has a slug magically appearing in her mouth for no reason whatsoever, or did the slug come and inhabit her mouth because she was depressed.

In the former case she's the completely innocent victim of a random mystic slug infestation, and the story has no real meaning beyond "Ooh look, gross slugs inside people" because there is no rhyme or reason to the slug infestation.

In the latter case the slug is the manifestation of a pre-existing depressive condition.

[sadoeuphemist]

She doesn't know. Neither do we. And none of us have any way of knowing. Perhaps an expert on mystical slugs could show up and clear this whole thing up, but none of them are around. So both cases amount to the same thing: there's a slug in her mouth, and we don't know how it got there.

When something terrible happens to you, you can wonder if this is somehow in some way your fault, or if it was just the universe randomly shitting on you. This is not an objectively answerable question, unless you are god. The correct answer is whatever helps you deal with it best.

Take depression. Is becoming depressed a result of your lifestyle and surroundings and actions? Or is it just a quirk of faulty brain chemistry, which has no real meaning beyond "some people's brains don't process dopamine right", that happens for no rhyme or reason?

[icon_uk]

So both cases amount to the same thing

As a reader I'm not sure it does, the outcome remains the same yes, but the context is different. One is almost a cautionary tale "Don't become morose or a slug will come live in your mouth and ruin your life" (Though in the same vague way that Jason Voorhees adventures can be read as a cautonary tale of "Don't have premarital sex".)

The other is "Shit happens"... or in this case "Slug happens"

Dunno about anyone else, but which option I pick alters my reading of the story significantly. The ambiguity does the reader no favours, and the lack of anything akin to narrative motivation in much of Ito's horror has been commented on before.

[sadoeuphemist]

What kind of moral is 'don't get a mental illness'? That is not a conscious decision, nor is it anything anyone can control, any more than they can control having a mystical slug come to live in their mouths.

In any case, this is not Aesop's fables. The author is not putting a moral at the end of the story. This is a spooky story about a creepy thing that happened, you are free to draw your own conclusions from it. It is not a bad thing that a work can have multiple different readings!

[icon_uk]

I deliberately didn't refer to depression for that very reason, you can be morose and moody and it has nothing to do with clinical depression.

[silverzeo]

Reading it like that now made me think of this: Roald Dahl could have written the same story, with the same ending for his Revolting Rhymes, or actually have a turn around by having her talk alot again...

[icon_uk]

Or Hilaire Belloc

"Yuuko was in such a fug
She found her tongue
Was now a slug

She tried of course
To voice her plight
But found that slugs
Don't speak aright.

She tried in prose
She tried in rhyme
But all she could say
Was drowned by slime"

[silverzeo]

"Fug"?

[icon_uk]

Yes, fug an uncomfortable, stuffy, oppressive atmosphere.

I agreee funk would be better, but I couldn't think of a rhyme at short notice.

[leoboiko]

Yes! great reading! As someone who has struggled with things like that, the story hit closely than I'd like.

also, awesome username ;)