A Note on Junji Ito's “Slug Girl”

Horror should be surreal. Horror is that moment when things cease to make sense, it's that moment in a story when what ought to happen doesn't and what ought not to happen does. And that, perhaps most of all, is why I find Junji Ito to be such a master of horror, and of course, a great inspiration in my own writing.

His artwork is insanely creative and detailed, any brief search of his name will likely be nausea or nightmare-inducing if you've never heard of him before, or even if you have. His work is almost simple in its conception in the sense that he starts with everyday objects or events but then reworks them somewhere in his bizarre imagination so as to come up with something incredibly twisted. And while his imagery is indeed brilliant, or brilliantly bizarre, I find that the other great aspect of his work is a kind of pervading sense of doom and helplessness, some kind of dark energy that fuels the world in which his characters live, a world they could never hope to escape from, a world that forever haunts them, not with ghostly hatred or resentment, but simply with its own cold logic. And while I could bring up lots of his stories to prove my point, I would say that Slug Girl does this masterfully.

The story can be summarized fairly quickly. A teenage girl notices that her friend, who was otherwise very talkative, has been acting strange and quiet lately, and whenever she does talk in class, she slurs her words. One day that friend skips class and the protagonist goes to visit her. Upon arriving, she finds the friend's parents desperately killing slugs that, for whatever unexplained reason, invade their backyard. The protagonist goes up to the friend's room and finds her in bed, wearing a mask. The friend immediately yells at the protagonist and her own mother to go away and leave her alone. The protagonist does so, thinking about the strange fear her friend had in her eyes... On the very next day, the protagonist visits her friend yet again who finally gets out of bed and opens her mouth to reveal that her tongue has been turned into a living slug...

With that kafkaesque development revealed we then get to see how the story progresses. And what is so fascinating about Ito is that he doesn't really bring up the common sense possibilities one would consider – the girl's parents don't rush her to an hospital where she's then examined by all kinds of doctors and scientists, there's no news coverage, in fact, the story doesn't even seem to be known beyond the little neighborhood these characters live in, it's almost as if the normal world doesn't exist. Ito creates his characters and has them thrown into a world made unlimited by its logic but limited by its space, and in many ways, they can't hope to escape that physical place, let alone the horror, a trait extremely inherent to his masterpiece Uzumaki which I should write about at some later date.

Instead of all of that, instead of what one would reasonably expect given the situation, what happens next is increasingly bizarre. First, the girl chops off the slug tongue with a pair of scissors, an event which is almost made more violent by the very indirect way in which it is depicted. Secondly, the parents try to intervene by having their daughter consume salt. Since neither of those options work, they instead fill the bathtub with salt and have the girl dive into it. She does so but after a while she becomes unresponsive. They dig in to find her body has shrunk though her head remains its normal size. They place the head under running water, weirdly hoping it will somehow help her return to normal even after such a turn of events, and indeed, we readers aren't particularly convinced that the girl is dead. And she isn't, sort of... Because then the slug reemerges from her mouth, having apparently consumed the girl's whole body and usurping her head, thereby making it its shell, a head with eyes that remain open and terrified, the girl then seemingly fully conscious, as the slug, now a snail, crawls along the trees in the backyard, forever drawing attention from onlookers.

And then it just ends. There's no explanation as to why it happened except perhaps a brief allusion to the girl's childhood, namely an incident in which her friends scared her with a slug, obviously alluding to the notion of repressed childhood trauma. But the story doesn't go deeper into it, there are no plot points in the traditional sense. The story also doesn't attribute any particular supernatural abilities or an evil intent to the slugs, as they are just there in the backyard, acting in a way coherent with their natures, yet they are seemingly so omnipresent that they even appear within the girl's mouth...

As suddenly as the story began, it ended, in a way coming full circle, but in another way, it doesn't leave the reader with many answers. Thing is, that might just be the proper way to do horror. Because as soon as you explain the specific and detailed rules of your supernatural entities, don't they automatically become, in your fantasy world, natural? If your ghost has a weakness and your hero exploits it, is it still horror at that point? In most horror stories, after the ghost is fully revealed, does it still remain at all scary?

I would say no, I'd say that once you reveal those answers your story loses all its mystery, and the more you reveal the less effective it becomes. For example, a lot of people initially disliked Stanley Kubrick's The Shining because, as an adaptation of the book, it leaves out a whole lot. But would you feel as horrified by the man in the bear costume or the woman in the bathtub if you knew their whole backstories? I'd say the reason that the film is so iconic is precisely because it messes with our heads by not feeding us any information, by making our brains scramble for something to cling to and, when we can't find it, we fall deeper into the story. It's a natural human reaction to try to make sense of whatever we experience, so when things don't make sense, that ensuing disconnection, that breakdown... that is horror. And Junji Ito mastered this. The more you try to figure him out, the deeper you have to go, deeper down that spiral, until you reach the end and you have no choice but to try again.

During my convalescence I had bought and read for the first time The King in Yellow. I remember after finishing the first act that it occurred to me that I had better stop. I started up and flung the book into the fireplace; the volume struck the barred grate and fell open on the hearth in the firelight. If I had not caught a glimpse of the opening words in the second act I should never have finished it, but as I stooped to pick it up my eyes became riveted to the open page, and with a cry of terror, or perhaps it was of joy so poignant that I suffered in every nerve, I snatched the thing from the hearth and crept shaking to my bedroom, where I read it and reread it, and wept and laughed and trembled with a horror which at times assails me yet.

Robert William Chambers, in The King in Yellow

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