The Spring 2024 Light Novel Guide

Stitches

What's It About? 

True story collector Hirokatsu Kihara teams up with famed horror artist Junji Ito to present a collection of illustrated spooky modern true stories with a supernatural twist!

A tumor shaped like a man's face slowly moves across a woman's body. The sea shoots glowing balls into the sky, much to the distress of beachgoers. And a girl dressed up for a holiday has no eyes, no nose, nothing—her face is a total blank.

Stitches has short stories by Hirokatsu Kihara and art by Junji Ito. The English translation is by Jocelyn Allen and is lettered by Eric Erbes. Published by Viz Media (March 26, 2024).

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Is It Worth Reading?

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

I've been a Junji Ito fan since his deliciously twisted Uzumaki manga was first serialized in Viz Media's Pulp magazine back in 2001. Since then, I've picked up my own copy of every volume of his work published in English. This may be the first instance where I don't bother.

Unlike every other Ito book currently in print, this (mostly) isn't manga–it's a collection of ten short allegedly true-life text tales presented by author Hirokatsu Kihara, with Ito illustrations interspersed throughout. For the $18 asking price, this is poor value for a very slim volume that took me, at most, half an hour to read.

The stories are terse, with minimal description or detail; some are written in the first person, and others are related in a dry third-person style like a stuffy newspaper report. Perhaps in the right setting – in the dark, or read aloud around a campfire–these very slight stories may conjure even the faintest hint of dread, but they were as spooky as a wet dishcloth for me.

Most stories in this volume hinge on strange apparitions of things suddenly appearing or disappearing without explanation. They're like the tamest of the tame online creepypasta, and about as effective at producing existential unease as my youngest child's attempts at creative writing.

One of the most notable stories features a woman with a face-shaped tumor wandering her body that's corralled by a priest etching Buddhist sutras on her skin. At least that's a cool idea. Other tales about mysteriously disappearing children or ghostly grandads garnered little more than a yawn from me. A story about a haunted puppet is derivative of so many other similar tales, though it has an amusing punchline.

The story “Snow Day” features a floating, hanging ghostly woman like any number of Japanese horror movies, and only the final story “Lips” shows a hint of anything unusual, yet it's so short and nothing really happens. I get that these are all supposed to be true anecdotes, but must they be inherently unsatisfying?

Ito's art is always interesting, but there are few of his truly arresting images here. He's given such mediocre material to work with. The graphic design, with its clever integration between text and illustrations, is creative, and there's one single manga story hidden away at the end, but even that's pretty underwhelming. Ito fans would be better off seeking their gross body horror thrills elsewhere.

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Lauren Orsini
Rating:
One of my favorite Junji Ito short comics is “The Human Chair,” a retelling of an Edogawa Ranpo horror story made all the more spine-tingling by Ito's unsettling illustrations. Even though “a man hiding inside my couch” is way down my list of potential fears, Ito's creepy art breathes immediacy into this otherwise obscure scenario. I'm bringing this up as an example of an Ito collaboration that hits hard in a way that Stitches unfortunately does not.

Stitches is a complete book of collaborative stories written by Hirokatsu Kihara with illustrations by Junji Ito. It is not a manga, but it isn't as long as a light novel, either. The title refers to how each piece is stronger with both text and stories combined than with just one or the other. That may be true, but I found these stories far too short and inconsequential to be described as outright scary. They're more like, “Something happened to a friend of a friend, and then everything went back to normal, and we thought, 'That was a bit odd.'” From a mysterious woman who can't be photographed to a smudge on the ceiling that resembles a face, this is an inventory of oddities with no stakes or consequences.

Take the story illustrated on the cover called “Snow Day.” A girl recalls waking up in the middle of the night on a snowy evening to notice her bedroom door was open even though she swore she'd closed it before she went to sleep. Through the open door, she thinks she sees a hanged woman. The girl blinks, and the woman disappears. Did she see a ghost? That's it. That's the whole story. There's no creepy buildup as to why a ghost might be in her house. There's no attributed motivation on the ghost's part for appearing to the girl. If it even really happened, there's no lasting effect on the girl's life after this supernatural encounter. All nine stories are like this: brief and indeterminate encounters with the unknown.

The best part of the book is the bonus manga that it concludes with. Unlike the other nine stories, Ito fully transformed this Kihara horror story into a manga. It's a spooky hot springs story that will be scarier if you wear glasses like I do and ever worry that you're missing something major without them on. You'll enjoy this book if you're an Ito completionist and want to own everything he's worked on. Otherwise, these stories (manga included) each feel like a fragment of something bigger, with no real backstory or conclusion.