Dissection Girl

[cyberghostface]

 

It's time for some Junji Ito... 

Warning for nudity and gore







Later, Tatsuro's classmates talk about the mysterious woman. She is known to have pulled the same stunt at other medical schools, posing as a corpse and trying to get the students to dissect her. It is also rumored that she lurks on street corners and asks passing strangers to cut her up. Tatsuro ponders why the woman looks so familiar to him, and at last remembers her name: Ruriko Tamiya.

Tatsuro knew Ruriko as a child, and she convinced him to steal a scalpel from the hospital where his father (also a doctor) worked. Ruriko took the scalpel for herself and began to cut open small animals, forcing Tatsuro to help her. 





Ruriko subsequently announces that she wanted to move on to dissecting larger animals, as she was bored with frogs and rodents. When Tatsuro refuses to help her, she decides to kill and dissect him.



Tatsuro never saw her again until today, eight years later.

As Tatsuro is walking home, Ruriko approaches him. She asks him to dissect her, and he runs away from her. However, when he arrives home, Ruriko is waiting for him in his bed. She is sorry for what she did to him; but claims he was just as cruel as she, and it wasn't fair of him to leave her in pain.





The following day, Tatsuro's class moves on to dissecting the internal organs. One of his classmates reports seeing Ruriko's photo on a dating site where she had placed an advert looking for a guy to dissect her. Tatsuro feels weak and shaky, and has to leave the class. That evening he hears on the news that a man was arrested for attacking Ruriko with a knife after she asked him to dissect her. She was taken to hospital and received life-saving surgery, but escaped shortly afterwards. Ruriko is now wanted by police in connection with her breaking into the dissection lab at the hospital where Tatsuro's studying. Tatsuro later hears rumors that the man who cut up Ruriko went insane, as did the doctors who operated on her. He wonders whether he'll ever see her again.

Twenty years later, Tatsuro is now a professor at the same medical school where he studied.

Comments

[dustbunny105]

That last line is killing me XD

I haven't seen this one before! Thanks for posting :D

[mastermahan]

*opens up a torso, discovers a grotesque, impossible medley of eyeballs and animal parts*

"Huh, I've never read about this before."

[captainbellman]

Very "Dunwich Horror"...

[balbanes]

I suppose the last panel is supposed to be horrifying. But I think most doctors would think "I am going to be so famous/rich for discovering this."

[donnblake]

So the frog, the rat and the bat are presumably animals she had dissected during innocent childhood afternoons of playing doctor. That makes... well, not quite sense, but it has a certain perverse logic to it.

But what's with the giant eyeballs, the spheres, the weird spiky coral thing sticking out her right hand side?

[bradygirl_12]

Extraterrestrial victims? I got nothin'!

[dustbunny105]

It could be meant to imply that she's gotten up to more mischeif since the animals, maybe? Idk. Junji Ito is like Mary Poppins in that he never explains anything. You can only roll along with it, really.

[sindra]

I love Junji Ito month. =)