5 out of 5

I’ll admit I’ve generally tolerated Soichi (or previously Souichi, I’d thought) in Junji Ito collections. The troublesome boy with nails in his mouth – like a cross between Chucky and Denis the Menace – has always felt a little out of place next to Ito’s more gruesome or surrealist works. But I’ve exactly just put my finger on it: Junji can be pretty funny, and when his humorous stories are peppered in to compilations more frequently, or isolated to a bonus section, it works; but Soichi hovers between being nearly terrifying – the boy is a great creation – and outright silly, and occasionally teeters into kind of anti-canon trolling if we want to consider his appearances as linear, making the tone of his tales hard to settle on against “classic” Ito oddities.

The cure, as it turns out, was to just give Soichi his whole book, and put it all together. I loved this collection, and something about the stories having some limitations in the form of plot-armored characters really made / makes Junji push to figure out how far he can stretch Soichi’s world, and he gets more and more playful with it as stories kept rolling out.

Soichi, middle child of the Tsujis, is approximately awful. He has a blood iron deficiency (maybe) and so sucks on nails as a cure, which provides him / Junji with the great visual of a boy smiling and showing off a mouthful of nails as teeth – a brilliant stroke that epitomizes the character: that’s horror movie Freddy Krueger stuff, that here just makes you shake your head like an internal chiding of “oh, that Soichi.”

The Tsujis cousins visit occasionally, and what might be a boyhood crush on cousin Michi, to Soichi, turns into him cursing her and spitting nails at her. We watch as Ito evolves this line of thinking: What if all the bad habits of boydom, as turned up to 10 in Soichi, were actually just because he’s an evil bastard? …Except he’s not particularly good at being an evil bastard? That’s the second genius wrinkle: we do start to see that Soichi might have some legitimate powers of persuasion, or mental abilities, and he’s just so silly and shallow and gets hyperfocused on the smallest sleights that he kind of stumbles over his own efforts. Or not, and Junji’s occasional inability to settle on a good conclusion for his stories gets repurposed as humorous shoulder shrugs, letting Soichi continue his antics into the never-ending night of a The End.

You still might be wrestling with this: isn’t this just propping up bad behavior as comic strip gags? That’s been the other joy of reading all the Soichi stories together: Soichi’s family only really tolerates him, or his teachers try to help him out. Even Michi will sometimes reach out a helping hand, leading to momentarily bittersweet moments. In other words: no one around Soichi is propping this up, Ito included. The scenarios are funny, but they’re either so ridiculous that their lack of consequence doesn’t matter, or Soichi gets smacked down to reality by another one of his failures.

…And a crossover with another (in)famous Ito character is a perfect capper to the set, showing where Soichi ranks in the supernatural world of Junji creations.