This is another Cannonball where I’m unfortunately not going to have a lot to say, mostly because the stories in this collection didn’t stick with me very intensely. Junji Ito remains the undisputed master of Japanese horror manga, but this would probably not be the story collection I would recommend to people who were new to or just becoming familiar with his work. For those, stick to Uzumaki, Tomie, Gyo, Shiver, or Fragments of Horror.
The title story of Tombs details a brother and sister who strike and kill a pedestrian while driving into the Japanese mountains. It’s their fault, they’re young, and they’re terrified. So they try to hide the body. The problem is that, like so many Junji Ito (and Steven King, and Rod Serling) story premises, they’re in a strange town where strange things are at play. If you die in this mountain town, your body calcifies, turns to stone, and becomes a tomb marker. If you’re moved after you die, your body cannot become a tomb, and dark things happen to it instead. So what does that imply about the body our hapless young people have in their trunk?
One of my favorite moments of the story is when the youngsters come across a hospital and see the doctors frantically wheeling a terminal patient into the parking lot, where there are dozens of tombs. It would be horribly disruptive for the man to die in the hospital. An entire room would be borderline unusable due to the gigantic stone now in it. This is the sort of detail that shows an author is really thinking about the world they’re building, and including everyday details that help you feel present in said world.
Like all Junji Ito, Tombs is on my shelf now. I love looking down the spines of these horror stories, remembering around ten years ago when I first discovered Ito on some listicle, and was dismayed to discover very little of his work had been translated to English yet. I now have like, a dozen and a half Ito volumes and am always hungry for more. Go buy Tombs so they keep translating him and I can feed my habit!
