Manga Review: Orochi: The Perfect Edition 1 by Kazuo Umezz
Despite her rather ominous name, Orochi doesn’t stand out in a crowd. She appears to be a moderately attractive woman in her early twenties. If you saw her on the street, you might not notice her at all. But Orochi isn’t quite human, and has strange powers. She doesn’t seem to be evil, but her perspective is that of an outsider, and so she inserts herself into people’s lives and strange situations.
Orochi is the continuing character in a series of horror manga by Kazuo Umezz, who was big in his day and influenced Junji Ito. Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch, which I’ve previously reviewed, was based on one of his stories. This fancy hardcover volume collects two of the tales of Orochi.
“Sisters” begins with Orochi just trying to get out of the rain. One of her gifts is to make people think she’s someone who is supposed to be there, and the beautiful woman who opens the door accepts Orochi as the new maid. Rumi and her equally beautiful sister Emi claim to live alone save for an “animal” on the upper floor. It’s actually their hideously deformed mother.
It seems that the women of this family are under a curse, or perhaps a rare genetic disorder. They are beautiful until about their eighteenth birthday, then develop moles, starting with their foreheads and fingers, but eventually covering their entire skin in dark lumps. Emi is almost eighteen, and knows she should break up with her boyfriend, but he’s also her only comfort.
The mother is now to the point where the skin growths have destroyed her health, but before she dies, she whispers a secret to Rumi. This secret turns the sisters against each other, and the story ends in tragedy.
Through all this, Orochi is mostly a passive observer. Her first intention is to serve the sisters as a maid until they die, but she’s tossed out of the house after a particularly violent quarrel between Emi and her boyfriend. (Orochi is still able to see what goes on by looking through the eyes of a portrait in the house.)
“Bones”: We are introduced to a woman named Chie who’s had a hard life. Her mother died in childbirth. Her father was an alcoholic who neglected and abused her, and when he remarried, her stepmother did the same. Despite this, Chie grew up to be a rare beauty. Her father sold her to the first man who came up with a decent bride price.
Chie’s luck had at last turned, for Saburo truly loved her, and was a kind man. All was well for a few years, until he was hit by a car and crippled. This is where Orochi initially comes into the story, as she’s now working as a nurse in an Izu hospital. The initial prognosis is that it will take three years for him to fully recover. But with luck and hard work, Saburo is soon well enough to leave the hospital and recover at home. Chie gets a job to support them. Soon enough, Saburo is able to walk around outside–and then falls off a cliff and dies.
Chie is inconsolable and calls for her husband to return to the land of the living. Orochi, touched by Chie’s grief, decides to grant her wish. She creates an effigy in Saburo’s image, so that she can insert Saburo’s spirit into it, giving him a new body. However, this is a horror story, and Orochi’s first attempt at raising the dead. The effigy fails to animate, but Saburo’s rotting corpse is suddenly alive. Mostly.
Saburo winds up at the hospital, but when Orochi goes to notify Chie of this good news, she discovers that the woman has abruptly remarried and moved with no forwarding address. Saburo disappears from the hospital, and Orochi also leaves town.
Two years later, Orochi (still wearing the same nurse uniform!) finds Chie and her new baby. Chie seems less happy than Orochi expected that Saburo is back from the dead. Orochi off-screen gets a job with a local doctor as a nurse (that mind-warping effect must make job interviews a snap.) Saburo eventually shows up, but he’s changed, and I don’t mean just having more body parts drop off!
Has Orochi learned her lesson about meddling in human affairs? This is only the first volume, so I doubt it.
The art is excellent, and sets the mood–you can really see where it influenced Ito. There’s a bit of same-face when it comes to pretty women, so we only know which ones are supposed to be especially beautiful by the dialogue and narration.
The first story is “gothic horror”; you could make Orochi a normal maid and not need any outright supernatural element at all. The second, on the other hand, puts the walking corpse front and center for much of the run time. Orochi’s an enigma at this point in the series, with no clues as to what she really is, her full motivations or her background.
Content note: Child abuse, child death, mutilation.
The hardcover is a bit spendy, you may want to see if your local library can get you a copy to read. Recommended to fans of old-style manga horror.
There’s a movie adapting the first story:
