(ocean waves crashing) One of the most
common things you hear when people describe the work of Junji Ito is that he's a true master
of "Lovecraftian" horror. His stories are known for their subtle, slow-burning terror about subjects like the gradual uncovering
of ancient truths too great and terrible for us to bear that we succumb to insanity. Some of Junji Ito's works
are held up as masterpieces of this school of horror. Like Uzumaki, the tale of a
sedate Japanese coastal town that slowly, gets consumed
by the grotesque madness of an ancient, world-devouring curse. Or Gyo, his epic about
wretched abominations from the depth of the ocean surfacing, and taking revenge for humanity's
ongoing transgressions. A story that will have you look, with different eyes, at our oceans, which still remain less explored
than the depths of space. That's where Hellstar Remina takes place, or rather, in which the world falls prey to complete chaos and madness in the face of literal cosmic obliteration by an ancient, galaxy-devouring life-form from outer space. These grand-scale cosmic horror narratives are some of his most pervasive works known to western audiences. Yet, the more I read of Ito's works, the more I started to
appreciate his more condensed, intimate and thoroughly
Kafkaesque stories. Ito is peerless when it comes to crafting short, self-contained narratives that focus on a singular core emotion, while bringing plenty of detail and nuance to support and cement its message. And typically dressed in
his iconically shocking, grotesque imagery that
unapologetically glues the impressions to the readers' minds. One of his most renowned works
in that regard is Slug Girl, or as I love to call it,
Junji Ito's The Metamorphosis. This one-off short story
was originally released in Japan in 1997, in volume seven of the Horror World of
Junji Ito Collection. It gained fame and recognition for its abject body-horror panels of the girl with the slug
crawling out of her mouth. It's not far-fetched to assume that the reason it became such a staple for Junji Ito's works is that
it's a near-perfect showcase for the narrative contrast that makes his stories so enthralling, beautiful, highly detailed line-art that uncompromisingly utilizes grotesque and repulsive imagery to
draw your attention and awe, but never for the sake
of mere provocation. Slug Girl is, at its
heart, a poignant tale, relatable to anyone who
grew up into isolation, alienation and soul-crushing rejection because of who you are. Yuuko's story is the
quintisential tale of the pain and the horror of being different. (dramatic horror music) Slug Girl is every bit
as absurd and appalling as you'd expect from a
good Junji Ito short story. And it has, all things considered, a quite straightforward plot. It tells the tale of Yuuko and her gradual transformation
into a horrible vermin. The story is told from the perspective of her classmate and cousin Rie, who has been noticing
that her otherwise lively and talkative friend, has lately become increasingly reticent and introverted. Aside from that, people started noticing how her speech became
progressively unintelligible, as if there was something in her mouth. Eventually, she wouldn't
attend class at all anymore. One day after school, Rie decides to visit Yuuko at her home. The house's front door is
locked and nobody answers, so she checks out the backyard. She finds Yuuko's parents
in the middle of wrestling a snail-infestation, angrily
dousing slugs in salt and stomping them to death in disgust. When the mother notices Rie,
she lets her into the house, and confides that Yuuko had
been in her room all day, and that her doctor had
been expressing worry about her mental health lately. When they enter Yuuko's room, they find her feeling terribly unwell. Her face covered in a protective mask, she keeps holding her mouth
shut in glaring discomfort, and in apparent shame shouts at them to get out and leave her alone. The fear that Rie saw in Yuuko's eyes it throws her back to a time,
back in elementary school, when Yuuko's classmates,
used to prank-scare her, teasing her with slugs from her backyard, and she recalls how utterly
terrified it had made her. It had traumatized Yuuko so much that she never set foot in
the slug-infested backyard anymore after that incident again. The following day, Rie returns
to check up on Yuuko again, when the mother rushes
towards the door in panic. She was expecting the doctor to arrive, as Yuuko had apparently
gotten worse overnight. At that moment, Rie and Yuuko's mother turn around to see her
standing in the door frame, choking, retching,
something seems to be trying to crawl out of her mouth. A giant slug forces itself out, it seems that it's her tongue that had somehow transformed
into a slimy mollusc, slithering, leaving a trail
of slime across her face. Scared and appalled, Rie
flees from the scene in fear, fear of the terrifying changes
her friend is undergoing.. After that, Rie never
returned to her cousin's house and was only told of Yuuko's
blight by her parents. As they told it, Yuuko, disgusted
by her horrible mutations, attempted to cut off her
tongue with scissors, but it just kept growing back, no matter how often she tried. Her parents kept her in bed, trying to rinse her mouth with salt, to douse and kill the
parasite in her mouth, but Yuuko's body forcefully
rejected the salt, spitting and retching it
out in pain and disgust. She kept getting worse and worse, and since the slug in her mouth made her unable to take in any food, she became skinnier and weaker by the day. Eventually, the parents
decided they had to resort to more extreme measures
to take on the parasite. They filled the bathtub with salt, even though before Yuuko
had clearly displayed repulsion towards salt. But ultimately weakened and feeble, she submitted and completely
submerged herself in the tub, and didn't come back up again. Her parents, in panic,
reached into the salt, trying to grab her, puller her out, but they couldn't find her body. Her father pulled her pajamas out, but Yuuko wasn't in them. Eventually, they found something. Yuuko's lifeless head
emerged, without a body. Salt running down her hair, her face completely motionless, eyes shut. The parents eventually
found that her whole body had completely shrunken down to the size of a tiny, shriveled appendix. Not knowing what to do, they
poured running water over her, rinsing off the salt, and hoping that Yuuko's
body somehow would restore to its former shape. However, the slug remained intact. It had turned Yuuko's head into its shell, and carried her tired and
apathetic face on its back as it crawled its way
back into the backyard. From that point on, the snail spent her days in
that slug-infested backyard. And any passerby gazing at it would get a sad, hopeless look from the shell, from Yuuko, in return. One of my favorite aspects of this particular type
of Junji Ito short story is that it's laden with
allegorical imagery, and it's rarely subtle. Sure, you can totally read
a tale like Slug Girl, and take it literally. It is, for the record,
completely valid to enjoy it for its visceral body-horror alone. But without reading between the lines, these stories can easily
feel like arbitrary torture and shock fetishization, needlessly cruel for the
apparent sake of cruelty itself. A high school girl,
for no apparent reason, pain and shamefully mutates
into a giant mollusc and then spends the rest of her days as the sad and lonely appendage of her completely indifferent
parasitic hijacker-organism. The end. If a teacher asked in class,
"so what was the story about?", you'd probably have some eager beaver raise her hand and say, "it's about a girl who turns into a slug!" And I mean, sure, that's, yeah, that's what is taking place in the panels. But that's not really what
Slug Girl is about, now, is it? Seriously though on that note, I'd live for Junji Ito
being taught in class! Stories like Slug Girl are so powerful because of what they have to say, and because of how that resonates
with people emotionally, even if it's on a purely
subconscious level. And I think this is ultimately
one of the biggest reasons why this story always reminded me of Franz Kafka's 1915 literary
classic "The Metamorphosis", or "Die Verwandlung," in
the original German title. The short story is one of
Kafka's most notorious works, renowned for its
grotesque and absurd plot, that famously opens with
protagonist Gregor Samsa, one day waking up from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed
into a horrible vermin. These two stories, despite their obvious
thematic similarities, differ in various key plot-points. Kafka's tale, for instance, starts with the protagonist waking up already transformed into a giant insect, while Slug Girl focuses mainly on Yuuko's transformation
into the eponymous slug. Yuuko is, manga-typical,
a high school student, while Gregor Samsa is a
salesman in his early 20s, both live in the house
of their parents, though. And while The Metamorphosis
is told directly from the perspective of
the protagonist Samsa, Junji Ito's short story is narrated from the viewpoint of the
deuteragonist Rie, and then later through third party
accounts of Yuuko's parents, which gives it almost
an epistolary quality. And while Yuuko's story ends with her transformation completed and hints at how she is going
to spend the rest of her days on the back of the slug in the backyard of her parents' house, The Metamorphosis, spoiler, ends with Samsa's miserable demise and his family feeling finally liberated of the great burden his
existence put on them. But despite these differences, you can easily spot the
common emotional kernel these stories share. Although they were written on
the other side of the globe, and nearly a century apart, both works center around
the exact same anxieties of being different in a
cultural and social environment that categorically rejects you for it. Kafka's short story has
been, throughout the years, often analyzed and discussed, and in hindsight, it's
almost painful to see how many even highly regarded
interpretations of his story ended up completely omitting
its allegorical metaplot, claiming that, it's just
a weird fantasy world! Like, next thing you're gonna tell me Animal Farm is not a
book about farm animals doing just normal animal farm things. (scoff) (horse neigh) In hindsight, The Metamorphosis reads like a desperate cry for help
of someone who tries to express their struggles with depression and social anxiety in a time
when mental illness literacy was practically nonexistent. And throughout the story,
Kafka vividly describes multiple clear symptoms
of clinical depression. Samsa's grotesque outer appearance has, yes, a repulsive effect on other people, but it's never regarded as something absolutely otherworldly. Nobody ever freaks out
that their family member is suddenly a literal giant insect. They just judge, reject and
eventually hate him for it. For being different in a
way they don't understand, and don't want to empathize with. The story of Gregor
Samsa is a literalization of how social alienation
works in the real world. The protagonist is obviously and outwardly different from his community, which looks down on him and actively works to exclude
him from polite society. His otherness makes him
literally feel like a vermin, a plague and parasite that has no right to exist in a society that he
is not able to contribute to in a way it's expected of him. Suffering from depression,
from social anxiety, or from any other debilitating,
invisible illnesses, and being exposed to constant judgment for not being able to fulfill
what society expects of you, despite you constantly
trying your hardest, it's devastating and soul-crushing. These things usually
happen over a lifetime of perpetual micro-aggressive behavior within your environment. It slowly, but unforgivingly grinds your self-confidence to dust. I am convinced that both of these stories carry such a lasting legacy because many, many readers see themselves in their surreal, kafkaesque realities, even if it's just on a subconscious level. Because almost everyone, at
some point in their life, finds themselves in a situation where they feel like a
misfit in their environment. Suddenly finding that you either are, or have become different in ways that you've never known nor expected, in ways that everyone around
you, including yourself, has looked down upon. Slug Girl is a story about bigotry. Not about openly expressed prejudice, lived as a conscious conviction, but about the subliminal kind of bigotry that permeates society and destroys you from within your personal circle of trust. Ito deliberately chose to
include several plot points that support its subtext about the horrors of
micro-aggressive bigotry a bit too conveniently
to be mere coincidence. Story beats that would
be completely superfluous in a straight up, girl turns into slug because suffer-porn is edgy tale. Yuuko gradually loses her
ability to communicate and recedes from her social circles, which puts emphasis on inability to grasp and express the sudden changes in her, and how they clash with
society's idea of normality. Her parents are repeatedly
shown expressing disgust and hatred towards slugs, as well as flashbacks to Yuuko's childhood highlighting how everyone
around her has always, naturally, treated slugs as
something abject and appalling. Undesirable. These elements are
quite explicit metaphors for culturally-normalized
compulsory bigotry. And this is supported by the fact that all the hell of her surroundings her parents extend to Yuuko
are purely destructive, aiming at erasing the thing
that makes Yuuko different, that makes Yuuko who she is. The four characters central to the story represent different facets of every-day, well-meaning, but ultimately harmful microaggressive personality types within our "safe" social environments. The father is a
rigid-minded traditionalist. He embodies typical
old-fashioned masculine values. He engages his daughter's predicament with a "we need to fix her" mentality, trying to solve a problem
like he'd repair a car. He resorts to brute-force methods, based on nothing but conjecture, disregarding and overstepping clearly telegraphed
boundaries in the process, like repeatedly exposing Yuuko to salt despite her rejecting it painfully, and despite knowing full-well
that salt kills slugs. Through this actions he causes intense, long-lasting physical
and psychological harm. He represents rigid normativity. Yuuko's mother is the flip side of the parental societal bigotry coin. She's timid and compliant in everything her more
dominant spouse decides. Several times she shows doubt and uncertainty about his decisions, yet she ultimately ignores her instincts and empathetic impulses. Despite wanting the best for her daughter, her indecisiveness makes her a bystander and accomplice in Yuuko's suffering. She represents compliance
with normativity. Her friend and cousin Rie is intuitively appalled
by Yuuko's changes. Her transformation scares Rie to a degree that she's incapable of
staying in her very presence, repeatedly fleeing in panic, despite Yuuko never actually
showing any aggression or posing any danger towards her. And the fact that the
second half of the story is only retold through hearsay and she never returns to Yuuko's house after the first exposure
with her real nature is not just coincidental. Rie represents a knee jerk reaction to confronting something outside
of the understood normal. Compulsory normativity. Instead of trying to explore or understand what is happening, she rejects Yuuko, giving into a subconscious fear. Speaking in outdated Freudian terms, her id screams, "what
if you're a slug too?" While her ego claws at the mere idea of entertaining such avenues of thought. To her, subconsciously, an open mind is opening the
doors for invasive ideas, which is why she stays away, even though Yuuko never
once posed a threat to her. Yuuko herself embodies the end-result, the canvas for culturally
ingrained bigotry. She begins her transformation from a position of
deeply conditioned bias, accumulated over a lifetime
of normalized rejection and fear of otherness. The moment it breaks out, it causes an intense internal
conflict to erupt in her, a violent dysphoria that causes
her shame, self-loathing, and drives her towards
self-harming behavior and self-mutilation. This is driven by the
desire to force her way back into that bubble of safety because she intuitively
knows how society treats what doesn't fit into their
walls of accepted normality. The genre of body horror
is quite commonly employed as a vessel to explore fears and anxieties rooted in cultural normativity. Our intuitive repulsion from things outside of our walls of normality, things that society deems
unsafe, abject, and undesirable. Slug Girl manages an effective split between grotesque absurdity
and crystal-clear allegory. Like Kafka's Metamorphosis, it is intriguing for
its grotesque imagery, but it doesn't obfuscate its message. Slug Girl is ambiguous and abstract because it doesn't aim to
address one specific thing, and through that it
manages to become relatable from so many different angles. Because marginalization within someone's cultural bubble of safety always shares the same
underlying patterns. Slug Girl can be about growing up in a heteronormative society where homophobia is lived out openly and casually by your surroundings. In a culture where kids in the schoolyard use homosexuality to intimidate
and emasculate other kids long before they have a grasp
of the concept of sexuality, only to come to the
realization that you, yourself, are attracted to the same sex. It can be about coming of age with media that thoughtlessly and ignorantly stigmatizes mental health illness as violent, as evil, as abject. And then one day, you get
diagnosed with it yourself. It can be about growing up in a culture with rigid, strictly
enforced binary gender norms, unconsciously internalizing transphobia by soaking through
microaggressive language and behavior among friends,
family and social networks only to come to the realization
that your gender identity is not the one you've
been assigned at birth. The internal conflict this creates comes from the notion of being
something that you've learned and internalized over a
lifetime to intuitively reject. Dysphoria is so pernicious because it's a primal force that's rooted deep inside of you, while the culture you live in relentlessly fertilizes it by steeping you in all its
biases and normalized bigotry. And when it erupts, it
ravages you from within. Slug Girl is about
growing up among bigotry that's so common and normalized that most people don't
even realize it's there. Kafka's bug story was based on his own personal
experiences and conflicts, but the patterns displayed
in both of these stories are so representative for
how cultural normativity pushes undesirable
deviations into the margins, that they resonated with many readers who saw a bit of themselves
in Gregor and Yuuko. The treacherous thing about our supposedly well-intentioned
bastion of cultural safety is that the whole concept of desirable normality is an illusion. It's a construct that demands conformity as the price of admission, and that can only function if we're willing to deem
those that don't fit our arbitrary ideals
unworthy and undesirable. When these margins of
safety are challenged, when those we believe we protect from harm end up outside of these barriers, it shatters the illusion. But it's they who pay the price for it. Yuuko's sad and hopeless gaze, condemned to live the rest of
her days as a literal shell. A husk of the elusive idea of what her society wanted her to be, is a warning to all of us. The nail that sticks out gets hammered in. Slug Girl is a cautionary tale, a warning to keep our
minds and hearts open to the ways in which each
and every one of us might, unknowingly and inadvertently, think, speak, or act in ways that contribute to a
climate of silent exclusion. Thank you so much for watching this slightly extensive exploration
of Junji Ito’s Slug Girl and for your patience waiting for it. This video took, start to finish,
several months of work, and the reason why I’m able to do this –- to give these deep and mature topics
the quality treatment I believe they deserve without sacrificing quality of
having to censor myself for advertisers... are my Patreon-supporters. If you’d like to help me out as well, please consider supporting my channel over on Patreon with a monthly donation that is
without your comfort levels - it makes a tremendous difference! So a massive thank you goes out to
all members of my personal army of slugs! patreon.com/RagnarRoxShow/ Until next time: ta ta!
