Many of these newer, smaller publishers are taking advantage of the current horror manga boom to pick up older, lesser-known titles like this one.
HER FRANKENSTEIN (Frankenstein no Otoko), by Norikazu Kawashima. First published in 1986 and first published in North America in 2024.
PLOT:
In his youth, Tetsuo Utsugi was a scrawny wimp neglected by his family and picked on by everyone else. He was fascinated by Kimiko Kimikage, a haughty, sickly, and angry rich girl who took a strange liking to him. She was fascinated by Frankenstein's monster, and to please her Tetsuo makes a Frankenstein mask. From that moment he is her Frankenstein, a creature who would terrorize others at her command. Her demands grew more and more extreme until a terrible accident occurred.
Now Tetsuo is an adult, but he is still haunted by Kimiko's ghost. There is something inside him that yearns for her guidance and to become her Frankenstein once again...
STORY:
Pedants will tell you that the real monster in Frankenstein is not the creature but Dr. Frankenstein himself, as his actions and neglect are what transformed the creature into a monster. In many ways that is true for Her Frankenstein as well.
Tetsuo was not a monster born but a monster made by the environment in which he was raised and the twisted affirmation he received from Kimiko. He was just a small, sensitive kid yearning for any sort of affection or positive affirmation. Instead his mother favors his baby brother, his father bullies him, a gang of local boys also bully him, and everyone keeps yelling at him for not being properly masculine. This kid was basically like a bomb in want of a fuse. All he needed was someone to acknowledge all his repressed anger and frustration and point it outward instead of inward, and that someone was Kimiko.
Kimiko herself is a real piece of work. She too is frail and clearly resents that she cannot engage with the world in the same way the other children, turning her anger and frustration with the world outward and using her family's wealth to shield her from any consequences. She would never admit to it, but in some ways she needed a friend just as much as Tetsuo did, although she tends to conflate "friend" with "lackey." It's little wonder that she fixates so much on Frankenstein's monster. In her mind, it represents the strength she wishes she had, the strength she wants to use to lash out at the world. That notion adjoins nicely with Tetsuo's own frailty and issues with masculinity, and thus a Frankenstein is born.
Of course, the problem with monsters is that they can be very hard to kill. Kimiko might have died in an accident, Tetsuo might have grown up and done his best to repress everything, but those feelings and memories never went away. Like Frankenstein's monster itself, that destructive id can rise from the dead with the right trigger, and the result is rampage and tragedy. That's part of what made this book so striking for me. The title and cover would lead you to expect this story to be a tale of supernatural terror, but instead it's about the real-life horror of two young people twisted by a lifetime of abuse and neglect.
ART:
Kawashima's art might look curious to modern manga readers, but it's perfectly in line with what a lot of 1980s shojo horror looked like. You can see the influence of the gekiga movement in the use of dramatic dark lighting and the shabby, lower-class settings of the story. You can see the influence of pioneers like Kazuo Umezz in the characters' gawky proportions, sallow complexions, and stagey poses and looks. Kawashima's take on that look is not as stiff as some, and it really starts to come to life once things start getting violent.
PRESENTATION:
Included here is a surprisingly in-depth essay on the life and works of Norikazu Kawashima. Not a lot is known about the man beyond his career, but what is known is that he spent most of the 1980s making shojo horror stories like this for an obscure publisher who specialized in stand-alone graphic novels, a format that had been around since the end of WWII. He toiled in obscurity for most of the decade until his go-to publisher shut down, after which he quit the industry entirely and destroyed his manuscripts. His work wouldn't be rediscovered by horror manga fans until the 2010s, and even then the publishers had to hunt down fans who possessed original copies of those books to produce high-definition scans.
If anything, learning all this makes me appreciate that the people behind this line made this one of their debut works. I can't imagine any mainstream manga publisher seeking out a nearly 40 year old horror manga by a guy who is barely known by Japanese fans with no international notoriety to speak of. This is a real passion project, and I have to respect both the effort and the care that went into this release.
RATING:
This book is published by Living the Line under their Smudge imprint. It is currently in print.
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