3 out of 5

Digging into the Junji Ito archives, we’re treated to a collection of adaptations done based on Kaidan Shin Mimibukuro, a book of (as I understand from the afterword) collected small town spooky tales that Ito then “enhanced” with further visualized and tangible versions of those tales.

While Ito (in the afterwords – one contemporary, one from the original publication) expresses some regret for embellishing the core work, it seems logical for his style: some of the shorter stories are likely closer to the originals (e.g. a sign casts a spooky shadow!), and you can see how this subject matter would encourage him to push it a bit further; to have fun with it.

Which is definitely the overall vibe: fun, as opposed to spooky. These do retain a “tall tales” vibe which I’m supposing is aligned with the book, and as such, things feel more harmless than usual – the Mimi of the title is our guide around this particular town of creepiness, so we can rest assured she’ll be around for each story – and the scares have that same campfire feel, not quite plucking at the unnervingness (or grotesqueness) of classic Ito.

As such, while there are some great concepts here, nothing quite has an enduring effect. The art is solid, mid-era Ito, nothing too risky but great main character characterizations and visualizations of the various haunts. I also admittedly found the dialect distracting: the original Japanese accounts for the Kansai region dialect of the book, which I’m equating to a midwest type folksy accent, but I think this could’ve used some grooming, perhaps using a couple layers of translators to get a proper English proxy, then aligned back with the original Japanese for intent / tone. Instead, what we get sounds a bit clunky, and, unfortunately, silly – like a straight swap of colloquial words for a lot of “yer”s and “ya”s.

The VIZ collection is, as always, gorgeous. The bonus story (Monster Prop) is probably my favorite story here; it’s not wholly out of line with the Mimi tales, but not in line with them either – it goes further and darker in a more classic Ito fashion.