Strange: Junji Ito's Tales for Sleepless Nights Is a Promising New Adaptation
Capturing Junji Ito’s uncanny style is a difficult task, but “The Rib Woman” comes close.
Despite the massive popularity of his comics in Japan and abroad, no one has really been able to capture the spirit of Junji Ito on screen. The 2000 film version of Uzumaki — recently released on Blu-ray by Umbrella Entertainment — came close, as did the first episode of Adult Swim’s Uzumaki animated series. The rest has been variable, to say the least, which is why Inverse’s interest was piqued when TV Tokyo announced the anthology TV series Strange: Junji Ito’s Tales for Sleepless Nights.
The third episode of the anthology series, “The Rib Woman,” had its world premiere July 22 at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, and Inverse was present for the screening. The episode is directed by Yuta Shimotsu, whose previous features Best Wishes to All and New Group both dialed in to a specifically Japanese style of weirdness. (Shimotsu is one of three directors working on the series, all of whom are relatively new on the J-horror scene.) Shimotsu’s specialty is incorporating social commentary into bizarre horror tales, which makes him an ideal director for this project. So is it the bizarre Ito nightmare trip we’ve been waiting for? Not quite, but it’s getting there.
The story stays relatively faithful to Ito’s original manga, which was published in English by Viz Media in the anthology Lovesickness. Rather than an afternoon at the beach, the TV version of “The Rib Woman” begins with Yuri (former idol Nagisa Saito) enviously watching her older brother’s girlfriend Ruriko try on a bathing suit in the mirror. Yuri wishes she had Ruriko’s tiny waist, and later that night she’s searching for advice when she gets an unsettling pop-up ad on her phone: “Would you like to remove unwanted bones?”
It’s a laugh-out-loud absurd line, and Shimotsu’s deadpan style is well matched with Ito’s similarly dry sense of humor. This is undoubtedly a TV production made on a small budget, and Shimotsu leans on dream sequences — we get two within the span of about 10 minutes — to tell the story with a limited number of locations. Ruriko and Yuri’s brother Keisuke play smaller roles here than they do in the manga, as “The Rib Woman” keeps its focus on Yuri and her internal struggle.
One memorable sequence comes late in the story, when Yuri visits a clinic straight out of a Silent Hill game to have her ribs removed — a real, but very extreme, method of slimming one’s waist. There are also standout moments of body horror: After her operation, Yuri starts seeing her bones move around like insects crawling under her skin, and the episode climaxes with a creepy-crawly gore shot that effectively brings the centerpiece panel from Ito’s comic to life.
There are missed opportunities as well, as Shimotsu chooses to keep the madness-inducing song Yuri and Ruriko hear after undergoing the procedure inside of the characters’ heads. By the end of the episode, however, Yuri is a giggling, demented shell of her former self, marveling at her uncanny, VFX-enhanced figure in the mirror. Body-horror takes on beauty standards have been ubiquitous in horror over the past few years, but “The Rib Woman” finds a fresh perspective on the concept by staying close to its inspiration.
