I'm not really into manga and that's my first real manga and not some Zombies Assembled garbage.

Yeah, I see now why people love Junji Ito. First of all, he makes his works alone and he really can do all the work by himself properly. I mean, his artwork is just awesome! My girlfriend reads manga mostly and I saw many things she read. Some of them had really lazy art: not really detailed, not mesmerizing, not on the same level as the worst american comics look. Especially with no color at all. But Ito has a brilliant style and I honestly read it much slower, than it reads, only because I stayed on some pages or panels to look at the art a little longer. This is epic. Everything is soooo clear, that you really don't need colors. And about writing... I dunno, it's hard to say something about his word, because I don't understand Japanese and I read english translation (which is already better, than russian translation of the english translation). However, the story is cool.

It's weird, it's schizoid, but at the same time it's interesting. Disturbing pages are disturbing in a good way and after a few chapters you really dig into this world. If not take it as something serious and realistic - you can see the metaphorical sense in all these stories.

Yeah, the connection between chapters is mostly lacking, but as a separate parts they can tell more.

So, as always in such cases I'll form an average rating for this book from all separate ratings of the chapters.

Chapter 1 - 7.5. It's actually might be even higher, but as an entrance point it lacks some good introduction of everything. And some things seem really weird and nonsensical at this point. But yet, it's an entertaining reading and not bad at all. It might be better as a beginning - that's my only complaint.

Chapter 2 - 9.5. Now after the man goes his wife. And that's a cool chapter. It's full of psychotic things and it goes really deep and depressing here. That's where I almost understood the reason of all this. Such a scary shit.

Chapter 3 - 8. It has decent gore, but I didn't really enjoy the core idea of this story. Mostly feels like a filler, but not a bad filler at all.

Chapter 4 - 8.5 - It gets weirder here and I thought the father of the protagonist will die, but it had a better resolve. And this really adds something to the main story.

Chapter 5 - 8.5. This is super metaphorical and it has a conclusion, which lefts a sense of incompleteness, but that was cool and it has some really astonishing drawings.

Chapter 6 - 9. Epic hair battle. This chapter was intense. Finally, our heroine is in a real danger. This is a good change of tone. Plus the problem of attention was shown perfectly.

Also I want to say, that the main character here, that girl, she's weird... She mostly has no emotions at all, which is really strange, because sometimes she DOES feel emotions like fear and in some even more scary situations she gives not a damn. But she's cool and I like how she connects even the most unrelated stories. more