With so many horrors happening in the real world, it's almost a relief to turn to one of Living the Line's latest horror manga releases and enjoy a tale of supernatural terror on its 50th anniversary.
MANSECT (Yochu), by Koga Shinichi. First published in 1975 and first published in North America in 2025.
PLOT:
After the loss of his mother, Hideo holed up in their empty house and filled it with insects. His body soon undergoes a strange insect-like transformation, as silk spurts from his body to form a cocoon. His transformation is interrupted before it is complete, leaving him a monstrous creature that is neither fully human nor fully insect. He takes to lurking in the woods and the edge of town, seeking out other disaffected men who begin to undergo their own bizarre transformations.
STORY:
Like any good piece of body horror, Mansect has the sort of premise that grabs your attention and does not let it go. The meaning behind that message is not always clear, but it's hard to complain when every turn of the page reveals something new and horrible.
You get the sense while reading this that Koga Shinichi had no concrete plan for this story and thus made things up on the fly. It seems like Hideo will be our viewpoint character...until he disappears for much of the middle third of the book, his story being swapped for a rotating cast of other disaffected young men before coming back. You definitely get that feeling from the many, many explanations people try to offer for these transformations. It's a disease! It's a new form of evolution! It's supernatural! They heard about someone doing something just like this years ago in some other country! Ultimately, it doesn't matter why it is happening. If anything, the randomness makes it all the more frightening.
Is it truly quite so random, though? If there's any sort of common thread to Hideo's transformations and those of the others, it's that they all happen to disaffected young men with complicated relationships to their mothers. Some are worn down by their mother's demands for academic success, while others grapple with absent fathers and working mothers. Either way, it is this stress that triggers the transformations, leaving these young men radically transformed (and often dead by the end of it all) and their mothers either die alongside them or are left only to grieve. Does Koga Shinichi genuinely believe that mothers are solely to blame for what happened to their sons? Or did he simply think it was a grievance that his largely teen boy audience would sympathize with?
That latent misogyny takes a particularly twisted turn when Hideo does return to the story. It begins when he makes friends with a lonely little girl...at least, until he swallows her mother whole like a snake. Later he fixates on a girl in a hospital who is the spitting image of a kindly childhood classmate, a girl he remained obsessed with even as an adult. Mercifully, this is not presented as a pedophilic desire within Hideo so much as it is a further symptom of his stunted emotional development. Still, the way this book implicitly contrasts these innocent, undemanding children to the shrewish, self-serving mother left a bad taste in my mouth. Turns out that these young men aren't so much mansects as they are monstrous man-children, all too eager to lay the blame onto women and make their problems everyone else's.
ART:
Translator Ryan Holmberg compares Shinichi's work here to other horror manga contemporaries such as Shigeru Mizuki and Kazuo Umezz and you can definitely see those influences at work here. The stiff, doll-like people remind me of Umezz's early works, and the dank backgrounds definitely invoke the likes of Kitaro. Yet it's his own take on these ghoulish transformations that sticks most in your mind after reading this book. Bodies wither into wrinkled corpses and melt into unnatural shapes as faces hollow into nightmarish death masks. While none of these 'mansects' look particularly insectoid, they are genuinely strange and horrid, blurring the lines between man, animal, and plant (even if a few panels clearly owe a debt to famous shots and promotional materials from some of cinema's classic movie monsters).
What's truly interesting is that you can not only see the influence of Shinichi's predecessors but the influences he would lend in turn to later horror mangaka. He loves to use deep shading and hatching to give the reactions of shock and horror extra punch, a move that became part of Junji Ito's own signature style. At one point, Hideo de-ages into a bizarre, goggle-eyed child that looks very similar to the sort of thing that Hideshi Hino would be drawing just a few years down the line. Koga Shinichi might not be the best known horror mangaka, but clearly he's a pivotal one in the history of horror manga.
RATING:
This book was published by Living the Line under its Smudge imprint. It is currently in print.
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