The Liminal Zone
The Liminal Zone is the most recent release from Junji Ito and features 4 new stories, Weeping Woman Way, Madonna, The Spirit Flow of Aokigahara,
and Slumber.
The first of the collection, Weeping Woman Way, stars newlywed couple Yuzuru and Mako as they travel to the town of Tohoku on a whim. During this trip stumble on a funeral where they witness a "weeping woman", a proffessional hired to show up to a funeral and cry extra hard for the deceased. After witnessing this Mako finds herself constantly sad and weeping and unable to stop. This strange condition brings the couple down a strange rabbit hole as they try to find the cure to Mako's condition and the true purpose of these weeping women. I enjoyed this one a good bit, I was sympathetic to Mako's plight and intrigued by the weeping women, though I thought her fiance Yuzuru was kind of whatever, didn't care much about him. Solid oneshot.
This story follows Maria, a student at Tensei Academy, a strict missionary girls' boarding school, led by the principle and his wife, Misuzu "Madonna". The principle has apparently had a long line of wives and lovers called Madonna, and is setting his eyes on Maria to be his next one, ew. Also girls are turning into salt. This story felt kind of half baked, I would have appreciated more build up to the ending as it felt kind of rushed and sloppy. A fun fact, apparently this story was apparently inspired by the fact that the name Madonna can be spelled with the characters for "Evil", "Angry", and "Woman", which is mentioned in the story. I did enjoy a lot of the imagery in the story, though I am biased as I enjoy religious imagery in general. A meh from me overall, not awful but not one of my favorites.
In this story we follow Mika, the girlfriend of Noroi following him to try and support him as he goes into the forest to kill himself after learning he has a progressive disease. It gets late and they decide to camp the night and find a good place to do it in the morning, but in the night they see a mysterious light, and are further confused when the next morning they find a trail of leaning trees, all stripped bare. As they investigate the cause and Noroi begins going through strange changes, Mika is left to try to understand what is happening. A real weird story overall, my summary really doesn't touch on the meat of it, I don't think I really cared for it and didn't find a lot of horror in it personally, probably the weakest in this collection.
Takuya Terada struggles with vivid dreams of murdering people, and even worse he sees these people on the news confirming they were actually murdered. Desperate to stop the killings Takuya investigates to try and get to the bottom of why he's doing this, and how to put an end to it. This one was very mid, kind of reminds me of "The Cure" if you've ever seen that film, though the cure is much better. Striking art as always even when the plot is less impressive, this one is just okay. This collection isn't terrible, but it's definitely not his strongest works. These oneshots were originally serialized in the beginning of 2021 and Ito's afterword reflects a lot of fatigue towards writing manga, and that he had been struggling with ideas enough that he went through old notebooks of reject ideas and fleshed out some of those for this collection. I think his tiredness really shows in these works and since this was originally written 2 years ago now (The passage of time is fucked up isn't it?) I genuinely hope he has been able to get some rest or some kind of break since then.
