Orochi is a mysterious, clearly supernatural woman who serves as our guide through the two stories in this volume, a little bit like how Golden Age DC horror comics House of Mystery and The House of Secrets had Cain and Abel fill a similar function. But in Kazuo Umezz's variation on the theme, Orochi is a participant in the horrors, and in one case the instigator of it all, albeit an unwitting one. Interestingly there is still an anthology feel to the series, largely brought about by the fact that this volume, the first in Viz's “Perfect Edition” releases of the work, contains two separate stories. In Bones, the second, longer story, Orochi's attempt to give a woman with a miserable life the happiness she lost backfires horribly in a case of "be careful what you wish for," while in the shorter Sisters Orochi finds herself living with two sisters who fear the impending loss of their beauty when they turn eighteen due to a family curse.

It's hard to say if one story is better than the other, because both are strong in their own ways. There's more of a delicious irony to Sisters that's missing from Bones, which takes a more traditional horror path, replete with gore and body horror. It might almost be worth categorizing the former as terror (psychological) and the latter as horror (visceral) for their very different storylines and approaches to the genre. The action of Sisters takes place primarily in the heads of sisters Rumi and Emi – they believe that their family suffers from a curse that makes the women turn ugly upon reaching their eighteenth birthday. Orochi stumbles into their home one rainy night, and uses her powers to convince the girls that she's their new live-in maid by simply touching her hand to their foreheads. Once in the house, Orochi quickly becomes fond of the sisters and decides that she'll stay and watch over them, our first indication that she's a more benevolent entity than the genre of the story she's in would suggest. In fact, Orochi herself has very little to do with the events that quickly begin to unfold around Emi and Rumi – she never plants an idea in their heads with her powers after the initial one to gain entry to their house. The sisters, as it turns out, are perfectly capable of destroying themselves with their fear of no longer being beautiful and their jealousy that one of them may be adopted and thus exempt from the family curse. This allows us to wonder whether the curse itself truly exists or if it's brought on by the ugly thoughts and emotions raised by the certainty that eighteen is the end date for their beauty – they believe it, and so it becomes true, one way or another. It's a statement on the obsession with youthful good looks and beauty standards, as well as how those can warp people internally, and we could read it as also being an indictment on cultures that expect or pressure their women to marry by a certain age; one of the sisters has a boyfriend who becomes tangled up in their family issues.

Bones, which is twice the length of its predecessor, warps the traditional Cinderella story, but in a slow enough way that its true nature doesn't become fully clear until the end. It follows Chie, a girl whose mother died in childbirth and whose stepmother treated her cruelly. After a terrible girlhood, Chie finally finds happiness with Saburo, only to nearly lose him in an accident. Although he recovers, he dies shortly after, and Chie is inconsolable. In this story, Orochi is working as a nurse at a local hospital, and she feels so badly for Chie and Saburo that she resolves to use her powers to bring Saburo back from the dead – and if you've ever read any horror fiction, you know that that's a spectacularly bad idea. More Those Who Seek Forgiveness (an early Laurell K. Hamilton short story from her collection Strange Candy) than The Monkey's Paw, Saburo's return quickly devolves into something more horrible than Orochiever could have imagined, even as she remains devoted to trying to fix the situation. While Sisters involves self-harm, Bones is all about the body horror, with decomposing corpses and death by either bugs or suffocation (or possibly both) on the table. It's a more complex story, but also a bit less interesting in that it lacks the ironic elements of Sisters and feels rather more traditional of its genre. Orochi's more active role in the plot is one of its best aspects, since it's less the humans who need to be careful what they're wishing for and more Orochi as she learns some hard facts about human nature, which is far more terrible than even Emi and Rumi showed her.

Both stories do a very good job of getting across the sense that Orochi (named for a mythical eight-headed, eight-tailed Japanese dragon) really does mean well – it's just that she's not human, and that makes it difficult for her to understand human nature. Her help is the worst sort of hindrance, and it's made tragic by the fact that her intentions are always, always good. With art that's easier on the eyes than Junji Ito's in that it's less likely to turn your stomach (although it is every bit as affective), this is a solid work. It may not be as visceral as some other horror manga, but it does still make its points, and Orochi herself is an excellent method of doing so. We all know that humans are usually the real monsters in the world – and nothing gets that point across than having an actual supernatural “monster” be the one to realize it.