A dark evil lurks in the unreachable depths of a pipe, groaning out moans that echo through the house of a germophobe mother and her daughters. In another tale, flowers blooming in the shape of eyeballs are only the beginning of the strange phenomena surrounding a mysterious transfer student. Could he have supernatural abilities? Also, a man in a village deep in the mountains shares memories of his wife. What happened to her after she said she would give freely of her blood?

Moan has art and story by Junji Ito. English translation by Jocelyne Allen. Lettered by Eric Erbes. Published by Viz Media. (October 7, 2025). Rated T+.

Kevin Cormack
Rating:

Moan is the penultimate volume of Viz's English-language editions of Junji Ito's 12-tome “Masterpiece Collection,” comprising short manga stories from his early career. They've been publishing these intermittently ever since the unmissable Tomie omnibus collected together the first two volumes in 2016. Comprising six stories, four of them sixty pages in length, with two much shorter entries, long-term Ito fans might recognize the re-named Flesh-Colored Mystery, which first appeared in English as the title story of Comics One 2001 paperback collection Flesh-Colored Horror. The remainder of this sturdy hardback volume's stories are completely new to English-language readers, however.

Anyone familiar with Ito's disturbing predilections knows what they're in for when cracking open the cover of one of his collections: unsettling, squishily gross imagery, unhinged dream logic, weirdos with twisted obsessions, and seemingly normal people overcome by the sheer bizarre horror of it all. When reading Ito's queasy creations, it's often best to leave notions of common sense behind to embrace the daft silliness and creeping, otherwordly dread. Moan is no different, imprisoning within its baleful pages flesh-crawlingly awesome examples of Ito's signature horrific craft.

Supernatural Transfer Student is an extremely odd tale about the teenager members of their high school Occult Club. While they're initially satisfied with potential con artist Hikaru's lame spoon-bending skills, when peculiar transfer student Tsukano joins them, they find their town changing in inexplicable ways. It's a very “Ito” story where crazy stuff, like the appearance of eyeball plants, dinosaur-filled lakes, and looming Moai heads, happen for no discernible reason other than it's cool and creepy. That's completely fine with me, and it's as unpredictably odd as only Ito can write and draw them.

Titular story Moan follows two teenage girls brought up by their clean-freak mother, whose obsessions have sadly begun to rub off on them. When a “foul, disgusting” boy begins to stalk them, their regimented and clinical home life begins to unravel in escalatingly horrific ways. Moan features typical Ito themes like obsession, and body alteration. It's not bad, but far from my favorite story. Blood Orb Grove is a vampire story written Ito-style with creepy plant-borne disease and a deeply unsettling central premise that's part Children of the Corn, and part Nosferatu. Its imagery will likely live on deep in my mind. Short story Near Miss reads like an incomplete creepypasta that doesn't really go anywhere, while Under the Ground is a neat little high school reunion story with a predictably macabre twist.

Flesh-Colored Mystery is easily the best story, a deeply distressing tale about child abuse and how perhaps beauty is more than skin deep. Like many Ito stories, it ends rather abruptly after pages and pages of increasingly insane escalation, but its events and gross body horror imagery leave a lasting impression. A collection that's heavily weighted in terms of hits rather than misses, Moan belongs on every Junji Ito fan's shelf.

Bolts
Rating:

It wouldn't be a manga guide without another collection of Junji Ito stories. However, this one does stand out a little bit in that it's not a collection of a dozen small stories, but rather a handful of slightly larger than average ones. Does this circumvent the usual problem I have with Junji Ito stories about them being too small to really leave any type of narrative impact? For the most part, yes, I will say that this collection of stories actually does a good job of establishing a proper setup and atmosphere before getting to the eventual dark twisted punchline.

Unlike a lot of other collections, there isn't really a consistent theme or idea that connects all of these stories together. The closest thing that a lot of the stories in this collection have in common is that a seemingly normal person has a chance encounter with somebody who acts as a catalyst for the supernatural. Whether it's a young couple who randomly finds a vampire in the middle of a village or a mysterious transfer student attracting weird stuff to every town that he visits, there is something interesting about just coming across things that cannot be explained rationally. There is one story that goes against this and it revolves around hygiene-obsessed, family dealing with someone living in their drains. The story took the most time to get to the supernatural element of the story, but then ended without any real payoff.

Speaking of payoff, most of the stories actually did end on a rather satisfying note. They're still open ended, but they're ultimately framed in a tragic way as to imply that nothing has really changed and the cycle that brought about the story in the first place is just going to repeat itself. That is a great way for Junji Ito stories to have their cake and eat it too; leave things open ended while still being narratively satisfying in some way. I think my favorite was the story that revolved around the vampires and blood fruit because it had the most unique imagery and I think it was the perfect encapsulation of this full circle narrative twist. This is probably one of my favorite collections but that also makes it the easiest to recommend. If you're a fan of horror and the supernatural, then this is an easy one to suggest.