Kazuo Umezu (1936–2024)

Orochi is a young woman with supernatural powers and a tendency to wander into other people's life to watch them self-destruct.

In the first tale, "Sisters," she uses mind control of some sort to convince two sisters living in a big old house that she is their maid. She then watches them fall apart and turn on each other as they count down the days to the older girl's 18th birthday, a day when a family curse will cause her to start turning ugly.

In the second tale, "Bones," Orochi is posing as show more a nurse when she promises a grieving widow that she will resurrect her dead husband. It plays out in a wildly bizarre variation of "The Monkey's Paw."

The storytelling here is too outlandish and strange for my taste, with people who don't talk or behave like normal humans and a protagonist who is a cipher with undefined supernatural abilities. Despite that, I'll probably pick up the next volume if it wanders into my local library. show less

“Adults always say ‘That can’t happen’ or ‘that’s impossible’ …But we know that /anything/ can happen. That’s why we’ve managed to survive.” -Sho, from vol. 3 of The Drifting Classroom, by Kazuo Umezu.
After a furious row with his mother before heading off late to his school in Tokyo, Sho Takamatsu’s morning already isn’t going well. But it’s about to get a lot worse: as he arrives there’s an explosion, an earthquake, then something even more extraordinary show more occurs.
As they pick themselves up and dust themselves off, the school’s inhabitants realise they are alive and (for the moment) unharmed. But the school seems to have moved. Suddenly, appallingly, there’s nothing outside the school gates except a barren, trackless wasteland. Where has the school gone to? What happened to the rest of the world? And what happens now?
That it’s the adults who crack first under the pressure of its bizarre and brutal premise is just one of the things I love about The Drifting Classroom. By the end of vol. 1 the school’s teachers and other staff are already turning in panic on themselves and, mercilessly, their students. But traumatized or psychotic adults are *just one* menace that Sho and his schoolmates will have to face. To make it to the end of all eleven books of this story these unlucky young people will need to work together to survive starvation, disease, a succession of weird and terrifying monsters – and each other.
The Drifting Classroom was first published in Japan (to instant acclaim) in the 1970s, but while reading it I couldn’t help thinking about two real events that had occurred just a couple of decades before. Writer/artist Kazuo Umezu was born in 1936: when he was the age of the children he writes about in this story he, too, witnessed living cities being suddenly and brutally replaced by poisonous wastelands when the USA dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
I can’t give The Drifting Classroom a straight recommendation: parts of the story seem sudden and random, and the constant parade of hardships its young characters are forced to endure (OK, so what’s going to go wrong for them now? -No! That, too? You’re KIDDING!) sometimes made the reading experience tip over, for me, from tragedy and horror into camp and farce. But whenever I came close to giving up on this series something brilliant always pulled me back. As with some classic old horror movies, if you can look past the wonky bits of The Drifting Classroom you’ll find a wild and audacious story, packed with moments of jaw-dropping amazingness that this reader, at least, has never seen anywhere else. The context, outside the story, for the stoic way Sho and his friends face their tribulations adds a fascinating extra dimension. Well, it does for me anyway. ;D show less

Sho is a 6th grade student somewhere in Japan. After a fight with his mom one morning, he walks to school in a huff. Shortly after class starts, his entire school is transported to a distant future where the world has become an enormous desert. Beyond the school's gates, there's nothing but sand. Everyone in the school is, reasonably, unsettled by this development, but the school's teachers become homicidally insane and have to be put down. The children then hold elections. Think "lord of show more the flies" re-done as a funny japanese sci-fi action/adventure movie.

I found a lot of humor in the over-the-top intensity: children are punched by adults, decapitated by giant insects and reduced to skeletons by flesh-eating swarms. It truly feels like the book itself is screaming at you all 700 pages -- almost every speech bubble is in jagged spikes. So much fun.

There are also some weird misogynistic themes that tamp down on the fun. There's literally a panel where a child proclaims that women are meant for breeding and shouldn't be involved in governance -- it may be satire, but I could do without conservative politics in my ultra-violent horror-comedy.

Also, although the art's very effective, there are a lot of visual shortcuts and characters drawn in awkward poses. It's not bad, it's just no junji ito virtuosity -- there aren't any panels I'd put up on my wall. show less

I wanted to like this more. The main story, about a girl who is obsessed with her reflection - until it escapes the mirror and tries to take over her life, was quite good, though definitely rife with Japanese cultural details that make it a little hard to get into. The back up story, though, was crap. I'm tempted to lower the rating on this book as a whole based on the sheer worthlessness of that story. After pages and pages of build-up, it ends in a one page deus ex machina. I expect better show more out of Mr. Umezu - but I guess even masters can have off days... show less