Tomio: Red Turtleneck and How A Manga Can Hurt You

EDITORS NOTE — ADD IMAGES

Generally, the ground feels more comfortable when you’re being embraced; though under those circumstances, I wasn’t very comfortable at all. My coworker’s fearful eyes staring down at me as I laid against him didn’t exactly set a relaxing mood, nor did the rim of the water bottle he was shoving against my lips. He caught me at the last possible second, but I didn’t know that at the time. I didn’t remember falling over. He was talking, but I couldn’t hear. He was asking, but I couldn’t answer. He was shaking, but I couldn’t feel it. The only thing I could feel was a thin line of nerves dancing around my neck; a phantom pain that rendered me helpless within my own body. And in many ways, I’m still helpless. I have to live the rest of my life knowing that the first time I fainted, it was because of a comic book.

I’ve had brushes with horror many times in my life: I remember the crippling nausea I felt when walking past the horror aisle in Blockbuster as a child; the box art of those VHS tapes, embellished with gore and killers, leaked into the recesses of my mind and fueled my nightmares; in High School, I remember feeling the sweat dripping down my body as the final strand of bone tissue forming my ulna snapped clean in half, the resulting shock muting the colors and sounds of the world around me, leaving me isolated in a world I couldn’t recognize; I remember coming across a disoriented biker on the side of the road, whose skull was partially visible after the asphalt ripped away chunks of his scalp like sandpaper. Yet, through it all, I never had a similar physical reaction. Nothing came close, and nothing has since.

In Tomio: Red Turtleneck (富夫・赤いハイネック), a 33 page black-and-white manga that toys with the limitations of the comic book medium, the author Junji Ito creates a scenario of inescapable horror using three elements: backwards analysis, visual design, and the many layers of fear.

Ito’s methodology, in what are believed to be his own words, is a process that involves “taking something normal and looking at it backwards.” Namely, he begins with a relatively normal concept and then warps it through backwards analysis into something deeply uncomfortable, thus crafting a narrative that is at once familiar and alien to the reader. In Red Turtleneck, that concept is infidelity. The story follows Tomio, a Japanese teenager who cheats on his girlfriend with a fortune teller. Eventually, he finds himself balancing his head on his body after the fortune teller slices completely through his neck. If he slips even slightly, his head will disconnect from his body and he will die. Bleeding out and not knowing what else to do, Tomio makes his way to his ex-girlfriend’s house with the hope that she’ll somehow be able to save him. While the connections to infidelity might seem to start and stop with the inciting incident, the way that concept is transformed and expressed in the narrative runs much deeper.

A closer look at the narrative reveals many familiar tropes that have been altered through Ito’s lens of backwards analysis. The antagonist’s weapon of choice is notably unconventional. Rather than a knife or something similar, the fortune teller uses a single strand of her hair slipped secretly into Tomio’s shirt to cut off his head. A common trope in melodrama is a woman discovering an affair through finding a hair on her lover that isn’t her own. The male lead is subsequently put in a compromised position, and this drives the conflict in the story. The subtext behind Tomio’s injury runs even deeper than that. Hickies are commonly found around the neck, and are equally compromising for a cheater. It’s interesting to note how Tomio’s initial response to his laceration is “the mark isn’t going away. I can’t go outside like this,” which feels more like an appropriate reaction to a love mark than a deep cut from strangulation. The way Tomio holds his head in place resembles a technique commonly used by athletes. Holding your arms up against your head in this way opens up your lungs to more efficiently take in air, cooling your body down. This pose is also associated with guilt. Putting your hands on your head is as a sign of surrender or submission. Several times throughout the story Tomio is told that he needs to maintain his nerves in order to survive, which clearly has a double meaning; he needs to keep his head on straight, both in an emotional and literal sense. It’s a setup found in fiction and in real life, but Ito’s process transforms it into something almost unrecognizable.

Tomio chooses to go to his ex-girlfriend’s house, rather than the police or a hospital, because at its core, this is a story about guilt and regret. The fortune teller’s behavior in the story subverts expectations in ways that enhance this core theme. She isn’t trying to kill Tomio like we’d expect; rather, she just wants him to suffer. Additionally, she doesn’t attack his ex-girlfriend, Madoka, and her only interaction with her is interesting; rather than threaten Madoka with harm, the fortune teller simply states that “the momentum will knock his head right off.” In other words, she’s not an inescapable killing machine attacking everything in sight; she’s a very personal demon that haunts Tomio. In his essay “Monster Theory,” Cohen theorizes such anomalous behavior by stating that “the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demesnes… [such monsters] declare that curiosity is more often punished than rewarded, that one is better off safely contained within one’s own domestic sphere than abroad, away from the watchful eyes of the state. The monster prevents mobility (intellectual, geographic, or sexual)” (Cohen 1996). Interpreting the story through this lens, readers can infer that the fortune teller is punishing Tomio for leaving his domestic life and exploring infidelity. This is made more apparent after Madoka chooses to save Tomio by stabbing the fortune teller in the back of the neck. After that, the curse appears to be lifted. In other words, it’s only after she chooses to forgive him that he’s relieved of his suffering. Madoka’s choice of weapon is also rather symbolic; the fortune teller, who inflicts harm with strands of her hair, is defeated by a pair of scissors. When the fortune teller dies, her body burns away. She ceases to exist because her role in the story is less that of a character and more as a manifestation of Tomio’s guilt. However, just like in real life, guilt becomes regret upon reflection. Three ghost children emerge from the essence of the defeated fortune teller, refer to Tomio as their father, and rip his head off. It’s a metaphor for Tomio processing the consequences his actions could’ve had. What if he got her pregnant? Would the situation be as easy to resolve? Would Madoka still have forgiven him? The fortune teller merely tortures him, whereas the spirits that come after are what actually finish the job. This could be interpreted as Ito suggesting that the guilt one feels in retrospect, once they finally understand the extent of what they’ve done, is what hurts the most. Even after forgiveness, the guilt still remains. Most might not relate to cheating on a loved one, but the idea of guilt is universal to the human experience. While the story is bizarre and otherworldly on the surface, at its core, it features tropes and emotions grounded in the familiar.

Comics occupy a rather difficult spot in the horror genre; right in between novels and movies. Written novels can inspire fear by taking advantage of the reader’s imagination filling in the blanks. Films, on the other hand, can use visual imagery, sound, movement, and editing to immerse the viewer in a terrifying experience. Comics lack the reliance on imagination of words on paper, as well as the use of sound, movement, and surprise films are capable of. They can be viewed as a written work that illustrates itself for the reader or a storyboard that lacks the punch of a scored moving picture. So what does this leave comics with? Well, a lot more than one might think. Junji Ito’s stories are deceptively horrific, taking full advantage of the comic book format in ways one might not expect. Over the years, Ito has found a number of methods for unsettling the reader that can’t be achieved in novels or films. Take his artwork, for example:

The protagonists of Ito’s stories are illustrated with very simplistic features. Their character designs are unassuming; devoid of physical quirks. They’re easy to project yourself on to; the sort of people you see every day and don’t look twice at. Their expressions are mostly flat, though occasionally possess understated hints of feelings. Their skin is perfectly lit, home to no shadows or imperfections. They’re like porcelain dolls; polished and pristeen, yet uncanny in their simplicity. While this all seems simple by design, Ito’s draftsmanship hints that there’s something more here. The linework around the eyes, the detail in the hair and backgrounds, it all indicates that he’s holding himself back. In these early panels, Ito is lowering your guard.

When the supernatural element enters the story, everything changes. Suddenly, the flat designs and straightforward linework of earlier panels are replaced with gruesome and meticulous craftsmanship. Black ink oozes down the sickly skin of Tomio’s neck, wrought with flurries of textured wrinkles and inflamed blood vessels. Quiet expressions are replaced with screaming eyes and contouring shadows. Ito intentionally limits his artistic abilities until the moment is right; setting his stories up through the lense of normality before disrupting it with visceral horror. Like the backwards lens he employs to warp a straightforward, familiar narrative, he relies, in his art, on the act of visual subversion of expectations to deconstruct a natural world. This contrast extends to the way Ito lays out his panels.

Scenes that depict normality follow a blocky structure, framed in neatly arranged rectangles. In contrast, scenes that depict visceral horror shatter like broken glass with uneven framing and jagged compositions. The results are stories where the page layouts themselves accentuate the content. His visual design starts off flat and structured before falling off into madness. It’s the comic book version of editing in film; while Ito can’t control how long a frame lasts, he can control how your eyes move across the page. Ito is also able to use his formatting create the manga equivalent of jumpscares.

YouTuber John Walsh mentions this technique in his video essay How Media Scares Us: The Work of Junji Ito, where he explains “Right when something really bad is about to happen, [Ito] always gives us this little panel right at the bottom of the page of our character reacting to something unseen, and then, it’s up to us to turn the page ” (Walsh, 2016). Above is an example of that approach being used in Red Turtleneck. Ito plans out the revelations of his stories to take place every two pages, meaning that when readers turn the page, they can be caught off guard by what they find. While this pacing is similar to how jumpscares work in films, at its core, the two effects are fundamentally different. As Joseph Ledoux mentions in Why We Enjoy Horror Movies, jumpscares work by triggering a defensive response in our brains, which is why a sudden loud noise, even if it’s something as innocent as the sound of a cute puppy barking, can startle us (Ledoux, 1996). Our body reacts with a sudden jolt of energy, even if the source of the scare isn't all that scary. In contrast, the page-turn technique in Ito’s comics doesn’t rely on the physical reflexes of the body; rather, it’s entirely driven by psychology and curiosity. The reader is an active participant in the pacing of the story, and this added responsibility creates a constant feeling of dread and unease as they turn each page. Unlike horror films, a page-turn can’t lead to a fake-out jumpscare because the information is processed differently. The reveal of the threat isn’t punctuated by a stinger sound or a lunge towards the screen; rather, it's the sudden switch to Ito’s style of visceral detail that catches the viewer off guard. That switch doesn’t trigger a sudden jolt that knocks the viewer out of their chair; rather, it horrifies the viewer with a sight they can’t pull their eyes away from. The result is a scare that doesn’t end as soon as it began; instead, it lasts as long as the reader allows it.

Red Turtleneck’s horrifying detail isn’t only limited to its artwork and visual design. Tomio’s laceration is only visible to the viewer as a thin line across his throat, so Ito supplements it with vivid descriptions.

Similar to a written work, Ito puts the reader in a position where their imagination completes the story. The detailed descriptions Tomio gives about what he’s feeling only make things worse for readers who’ve projected themselves onto him. These descriptions target the type of reader who thinks through a scenario and contemplates how they’d feel and what they’d do, making it easier to put themselves in Tomio’s shoes. These gruesomely detailed physical descriptions likely come from Ito’s studies of human anatomy. In an interview with Grape Japan, he explained “I learned names of body parts in Latin and learned some basic anatomy. Beyond that, however, I learned not through school textbooks but rather illustrated anatomy books for medical students which I bought for myself at bookstores” (K, Ben 2019). Most of Ito’s stories feature body horror in some capacity, and this chapter of his life is one of the things that sparked his interest in that brand of horror.

The final element of Junji Ito’s writing that brings everything together centers on his ability to target areas of fear that run deep in our psychology. Red Turtleneck features many different layers of fear: the fear of torture without the release of death, the fear of our own bodies, and the fear of what can’t be understood just to name a few. I think what stands out to me about Ito’s work is how death is often the least of the characters’ worries. Uzumaki ends with the main character’s assimilation into the spiral and their eternal existence within it, Earthbound and Death Row Doorbell features characters having to face those who hurt them and forgive the unforgivable, Gyo features the fear of humiliation and slavery, and The Enigma of Amigara Fault features the fear of conformity and society. Rarely are Ito’s stories about the fear of death; rather, they more often center on the fear of suffering. In Red Turtleneck, the fortune teller isn’t threatening because she wants to kill Tomio, but because she wants to torture him while he’s unable to stop her. This connects to another fear presented in many of Ito’s works: the fear of the human body. Dissection-chan tackles our unhealthy curiosity with our bodies, Layers of Fear centers on how our bodies change over time, and Glyceride focuses on the disgusting aspects of our human form. In Red Turtleneck, Tomio is trapped in his body with no way to escape. He shouldn’t be alive, yet he continues to exist and suffer because of it. Rather than a quick death, he’s trapped in a prison that’s one wrong step away from self-destruction. He is helpless. Finally, there’s the fear of what can’t be understood. Most of the creatures featured in Ito’s comics exist beyond human comprehension, and while the fortune teller isn’t a cosmic horror like the threat in Ito’s aforementioned Uzumaki, she’s still difficult to understand. Her motivations don’t follow the logic of a traditional horror story antagonist. She’s not a killing machine; she’s a personal demon. While there are many examples of horror films that feature monsters that mainly target a single individual, such as Us, The Babadook, and It Follows, most of the time those monster’s motivations are explained. Us explains the origin of the cloning facility, The Babadook’s end goal is illustrated several times, and It Follows gives a breakdown of the ruleset the monster abides by. Ito, on the other hand, never gives an origin story, rarely explains motivations, and never reveals the ruleset of the creatures in his stories. Horror stories can be viewed, at their most basic level, as a series of questions, and a writer must strike a balance between what is answered and what’s left to the imagination. The modern idea of a zombie apocalypse is more of a power fantasy than a horror story because their motivations and their weaknesses are well known to the general public. It’s for that reason that most zombie stories exist in universes where their mythos doesn’t; where people don’t know the rules or what to expect. Many questions have been asked, and too many have been answered, and now zombie infestations have been gamified.

Conversely, a writer should avoid giving no answers. The horror short The Box featured in the 2017 anthology film XX is a perfect example of this. The story follows a child who, after looking into a box he shouldn’t have, slowly allows himself to starve to death. The crux of the story is what the child saw in the box that day, which is a question that remains unanswered, yet it’s also the only question posed to the viewer. The story is a mystery with no revelations; a game of Clue that ends before the board is even set. I believe Ito strikes a perfect balance with his stories. Red Turtleneck asks a number of questions, but only answers the important ones. Ito shows what the threat is and what it will do if it catches you, but doesn’t explain its logic or ruleset. He gives us enough information to infer our own conclusions, while still leaving us uncertain. As a result, the monster remains terrifying, even after it’s defeated, because it isn’t understood.

Generally, the ground feels more comfortable when you’re being embraced; though under those circumstances, I wasn’t very comfortable at all. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that it wasn’t my coworker’s fearful eyes that made me so deeply uncomfortable in that moment. It wasn’t the humiliation of what caused my fall, nor was it the disorientation that followed it. No, what truly scared me was that, in that moment, I had become Tomio. After fainting, I became trapped in my own body, surrounded by a world I couldn’t recognize. I was punished for my curiosity by a force I couldn’t understand, and I felt the sting of guilt as I helplessly looked up at the person kneeling above me, a person who now had to deal with product of my misjudgment. And in a lot of ways, much like Tomio, I’m still helpless. Regardless of the fact that my head is attached, the memory of the fear I felt has stayed with me like nothing else ever has.