Hino Horror #5: Living Corpse
by Hideshi Hino
DH Publishers
Japanese Graphic Novel (Printed in USA)
English Language version
ISBN 0-9745961-5-9
$9.95

One thing Hino excels at is ghost stories or haunted house stories. A normal writer would have a restless spirit in the form of the chain-rattling apparition of a spurned Victorian lover or the table-knocking poltergeist of a child who doesn’t know he’s passed on the to other side pestering the mortals. These solemn spectres can be laid to rest with the completion of a little puzzle and a tying up of the narrative knots.

There is no such easy resolution in a Hino Horror story.

Shinkai Yosuke doesn’t know where he came from. He wanders around in a place he doesn’t know where the people run away from him in fear for their lives. He has no idea why he is here or even who he is. Then he sees his face in a shop window. What a disgusting horrible creature. A rotting corpse that thinks and breathes and speaks. Surely this can’t be true? Who is Shinkai Yosuke and why is he in this seaside town?

The doctors who take him into their care have no idea either but subject Yosuke to further excruciating pain in an attempt to stop him rotting away to nothing, injecting him with preservative fluids and pumping giga-watts of electricity through his decaying body in a futile attempt to revive his cells . As earlier mentioned, even the undead don’t escape the tortures of the degradation of the body. Hino never lets up on the mental and physical agony he subjects his ‘hero’ to. Following a fatal accident at the hospital where he is being held captive, Yosuke escapes and is quickly branded Public Enemy #1.

There’s a slight negative aspect to this book but it has nothing to do with Hino, more to do with the way the original Japanese has been translated into English. The offending scene involves Yosuke and a drunk, in a jail cell. It’s a really short scene, too – it just stands out as not up to the quality of the rest of the book. The drunk has this terrible colloquial English accent and it’s hard to discern whether it’s supposed to be Scottish, Australian or Germanic – this should have been dealt with at the editorial stage.

Overall, this is another great read from Hino, with real human appeal and real human suffering. Will Yosuke find out why he is rotting away, leaving a trail of puss and maggots all over this seaside town? Will he discover anything about his past life? Will he return home?

A touching and poignant tale.

Hino Horror #6: Black Cat
DH Publishers
Japanese Graphic Novel (Printed in USA)
English Language version
ISBN 0-9745961-6-7
$9.95

Of the six Hino Horror titles I have reviewed to date, this one Black Cat is my very favourite. It’s unsurprisingly about a black cat who lives in a drainpipe on a rubbish tip with his three kitten brothers. Their mother hasn’t returned and is unlikely to. So, one day our little black hero goes off in search of a decent meal or a friendly human that will give him a home. He’s a lovely black cat, too – smooth black fur and a gorgeous outlook on life. It’s such a shame that black cats are considered unlucky creatures in Japan.

The book is laid out in three episodes that illustrate Black Cat’s study of the human race.

One: THE VENTRILOQUIST
This is basically the story of the ventriloquist dummy dominating its master. We’ve all seen this sort of narrative before, it has resonance through fairy-tales with ‘the goose that lays the golden egg’ as well as popular culture in the Chucky films and Magic starring Anthony Hopkins. It’s Pinnochio gone bad, with the puppet softly transforming into a real boy as the success of the duo starts to dominate the puppet’s psyche and spells the end for his drunken clown partner.

Two: BLACK DOG
This is a story about a boy who loses his dad and takes revenge on the school bullies by setting his black dog on them. He pushes the dead bodies of the bullies into a nearby hole and the hole starts to fill up. His life takes a turn for the worst when his mum remarries this awful bloke who pays for the wife as if she were a cheap trinket in a corner shop. Will the new dad stand in the way of the boy and his black dog? Who is the real master in this house?

Three: THE UNHAPPY COUPLE
In this childish and vicious episode, a nasty old couple argue all the time. There is indeed a fine line between love and hate. But the fact that these old gets stay together says something deeper about the human puzzle.

All three tales are about survival in the face of cruel domination, regular themes in Hino’s work, illustrating man’s blatant disregard for the feelings and wishes of his fellow man. As long as I get mine, who gives a shit about you and yours. I wonder where Religion comes into Hino’s mentality, or if not something as strictly regimented as religion then spirituality at least. Does Hino believe we are just an assemblage of atoms and molecules that are in this transitory phase of human existence to return to fertiliser after our demise or is there a hidden non-corpse-bound spiritual realm that Hino has yet to fully explore in his works? And if so would it be bound by the same humanistic silhouettes and desperate purges of the world of his books.

Hino is a star of Japanese manga not because he is so brutal with his characters and his graphic depictions of violence among men but because of narrators like Black Cat who clearly enjoy and are enthralled by the vagaries of human existence. With all six books so far, Hino is really asking who are we, the human race? Why are WE so special?

Mike Philbin is the man behind the surrealist writing entity Hertzan Chimera R.I.P. who gave us SZMONHFU (novel), UNITED STATES (novel), ANIMAL INSTINCTS (collection), SPIDERED WEB (non-fiction interviews), CHIM+HER (collaborations), CHIM+HIM (collaborations), the annual CHIMERAWORLD anthology and website Weird Space's FUCK STAR series (co-written with MF Korn and Alex Severin). He is now relaunching his writing career with a fresh style of writing. Mike is the editor of the HORROR QUARTERLY ezine and will continue to edit future CHIMERAWORLD editions. His new novel Yôroppa is due from HELLBOUND BOOKS in early 2006.