[Book Review] Love Sickness (2021)

Lovesickness is one of Junji Ito’s lesser-known titles - Tomie and Uzamaki are the most famous - but Lovesickness certainly rivals them in terms of storytelling.  Lovesickness is the collection’s main story, which follows Rysusuke who returns to a town where he had once lived before. 

The town is ominous as the people within it are fanatics of “crossroad fortune-telling”. This is where an individual must stand at an intersection and wait for the first passerby to tell them their fortune. One day a “beautiful boy dressed in all black clothing, with a pierced ear”, known as the boy in black, begins to maliciously tell the young women of the town bad fortunes.

The young women quickly become obsessed with the boy in black: each wants to fulfil his twisted fortunes. He turns friends against friends, leads a woman to kill her lover’s son and set herself ablaze, and culminates in the mass suicide of teenage girls. Amidst this chaos, Rysusuke begins patrolling the intersections trying to stop the boy in black from telling fortunes. 

Lovesickness explores being a prisoner of guilt. Although Rysusuke appears very sweet natured, readers quickly realize that he harbours a dark secret. During his childhood, a woman committed suicide because he told her a cruel fortune. Harbouring guilt for the women’s death, Rysusuke patrols the intersections to prevent further suicide. Would Ryusuke be as obsessed with finding the boy in black if he did not want to right his own wrongs? Lovesickness also explores the horrors that come with idolatry. The young women lose their sanity because of their idolisation of the boy in black and in the end, they kill themselves because of him. Ito uses sexist tropes to ridicule how the media portray women. The women in Lovesickness always ask about love in their crossroad fortunes as if love is the only thing that is important to them. 

Overall, Lovesickness is perhaps not one of Ito’s strongest pieces of work, but has fantastic horror elements, some of which resonate in real life. My second favourite story in the collection is “The Rib Woman”, which focuses on women who surgically remove their rib cages. The story reinforces the horrors of beauty standards that pressure women to change their appearances. There are three other stories within the collection, “The Strange Hikizuri Siblings”, “The Mansion of Phantom Pain” and “Memories of Real Poop”. The latter is my least favourite because of its incorporation of comedy – but some people enjoy the mixture of comedy and horror, so if that is the case, they may like the story. If you are a fan of body horror, grotesque images, and ghost stories, then you may like this collection.

You can purchase Lovesickness here.

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