Orochi Blood

I originally read this manga years ago on a whim, as it showed up highly rated in a horror manga tag, and remember greatly enjoying it. I have been wanting to reread it for a while, and after my last few horror manga readings have left me dissapointed and still hungry I finally committed to it. Orochi is a work by Kazuo Umezu that follows an ageless woman with supernatural powers, named Orochi, as she observes people's lives and often how they go wrong. I consider this manga one of my favorites(There's even a panel from it in my manga pages background!), and on rereading it I'd consider that still to be true, though I admit I notice more cracks in it while rereading than I did initially. Like many of Umezu's works the stories of Orochi contain themes of intergenerational conflict, as well as revenge and the ways the human heart can become corrupted. This work is certainly more psychologically focused than Umezu's other more well known works like God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand and Drifting Classroom, often focusing more on how horrific it is that a human can do such a thing, rather than the grizzly details. The protagonist Orochi is fun to follow, she is often prone to her own whims and a majority of the stories in Orochi start because she just happened to see an interesting person and start following them. She is also very interesting because she doen't understand many of regular peoples complex feelings, and the ending of a lot of the stories show her reflecting on what she just saw and reconciling it with what she thinks of as the human experience.

While I did overall enjoy my reread, I did mention that not everything was as good as I remember, and something I noticed more on my reread that didn't bother me as much initially was how much characters just yell... it is an older horror manga so it isn't shocking that dialogue isn't always mnd blowing but there were points in the story that I was just, so sick of reading "UWAHHH!" every time something mildly fucked up happened. Characters outside of Orochi also weren't terribly memorable and could be grating in some stories, especially the characters in the 5th story Key, which imo is the weakest of the 9 story collection.

Minor grievances aside, I enjoyed my reread and would still recommend this work to others, it's an earlier work of Umezu's but still worth the read at least once, these works inspired Junji Ito back in the day and even now I can understand why!