Roar of Ages

[cyberghostface]

Read from right to left.

The story opens with two hikers Masaki (the one with the glasses) and Mimura (the one with the bandana) going hiking. Eventually they get themselves lost. Even their compass has stopped working.




Then they come upon a roaring flood with several people trapped in the water.



Mimura figures something's not right as it hasn't been raining but Masaki figures a dam must have burst.



The two set up camp.



The next day they hear the roaring again as another flood sweeps by. They recognize the same girl before trapped and realize that it's a repeat of the previous one. Mimura tries to film it but nothing shows up but noise.

On further travelling they come across a small house with an old man living there.



The old man explains that the dam burst thirty years ago and took an entire village. Ever since then it has been subject to illusions of the flooding. He wonders if the illusion was born of the pain of the people left behind.





The old man tells them that he built a magnetic detector that warns him of disturbances caused by the illusions. The flood has returned.



The old man yells for the people to grab onto the net but they are unable to.












 

Comments

[sindra]

One of the nicer Junji Ito stories, to be sure.

[filthysize]

I love how by his standards, this is a really happy ending.

[icon_uk]

The guys is very casual about regaining and then losing his FATHER within the space of a few minutes.

[darkblade]

He lives in a Junji Ito-verse. He just knows he is lucky not to be subjected to bizarre body horror for not real reason.

[ar_feiniel]

Junji Ito stories are like landings: any one you can walk away from is a good one.

[donnblake]

Maybe his father! Maybe not! Now they'll never know! He definitely can't check with his aunt and uncle about whether his parents lived in that area, or what happened to them, or check any news source or anything!

I mean, he could, be in one of these comics, asking questions like that would probably just result in his internal organs all turning into water, and eventually him getting a small cut, and it all draining out leaving him an empty skin.

[blackruzsa]

Well he didn't know if it was his dad.
And judging by how they were pretty much "oh look, drowning people" the first time they saw the flood tells me these guys are jaded.

[zabilac]

Wait, a story that the has the main characters NOT suffering some kind of tragic loss? *looks around nervously for the apocalypse*

[icon_uk]

He's just watched his (likely) father drown, and was traumatised as a child following the death of his mother. I know if we're talking Ito we're at a new scale of such things, but even so...

[blackruzsa]

That was so touching. Goodness.

[cypherfdp]

"Hey, wait, I think you might be my father!"
"What? No, my son died of pneumonia a few days later."

[cleome45]

I think this is actually a standout of the scans we've seen here. I mean, there's always something worthwhile in Junji Ito's stories, but... I guess here the characterization/art seems more understated, more human-scaled or something.

[ar_feiniel]

Yeah, I really like this (and I like Junji Ito in general).

This one gets closer to being about something more than just Junji Ito subjecting characters to their (or the audience's) subconscious fears. It's about Masaki solving a mystery of his past, and about the power of guilt.

Junji Ito reminds me a lot of The Twilight Zone. Most of the time innocent people got swept up into Rod Serling's universe and tormented in rather unfair ways (and that isn't necessarily a bad thing -- I love The Twilight Zone). The episodes could always be counted on to trigger certain feelings in the audience (living dolls, nuclear war, McCarthyism, etc). But every once in a while you got a rare one that did the above AND had something to say about the characters themselves.

[stolisomancer]

A friend of mine is a big anime buff, and something she said to me years ago has always stuck with me: Japanese society has a higher focus on the importance of family than we do, which sometimes gets lost in translation.

The example she used was how if you sit down and look, an absurd number of Japanese RPGs and other games feature the player's character fighting his parents, because that's one of the most horrible things that a native Japanese writer can think of.

With that in my mind, I wonder if the ending of this strip would be a great deal more horrifying to a Japanese person, since the guy almost found his parents, but not quite.

[espanolbot]

Kind of weird reading this after watcing the Stone Tape on Youtube a couple of days ago.

It's a tv play from the early Seventies, written by the guy who did the Quatermass stories, about a bunch of electronics experts moving into an old house to turn it into an RnD facility, only to find that one of the rooms is "haunted". They then turn their fancy 70s scientific equipment to studying the phenomena to see if they can find out how the haunting works.

Things go predictably horrible.

The reason I brought it up is that it had a debate going forth throughout the play whether the ghost is just a recording of a traumatic event, or whether she's actually sentient. That kind of comes into play here too.

[kamino_neko]

Man, Masaki is one young looking 30-year old...