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

[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.