What's fascinating about this book is watching Ito adapt his signature style - which is, if anything, just as weird and terrifying and beautiful here as in his horror tales - to this different mode.

Junji Ito lleva a su terreno la obra de Osamu Dazai, le da forma, la desarrolla e incluso añade elementos nuevos, como es usar al mismo Osamu Dazai como un personaje más. While Ito has taken a few liberties with the plot, this manga adaptation remains largely faithful to Dazai’s original and explores darkness, guilt and self-degradation in a viscerally chilling new angle through Ito’s incredible artwork. To compensate he becomes a class clown and womanizer in attempts fit in with other people -- from whom he feels separate and whom he hates and fears. An unpleasant and unappealing semi-autobiographical iteration of the artist as a tortured soul is adapted into a quasi-horror manga by Junji Ito filled with dread and supernatural flourishes. Formally speaking, Ito's art is decent enough, a simple naturalism, but one quickly becomes bored with the imagery he falls back on.In some ways, for me, that brings the author (in this case, Ito) and the character closer together and exacerbates the awfulness of the content. Originally I read Junji's piece first, not even knowing that it was a version of a Japanese classic book. One gets kind of sick of the facial expressions, not sick like sick with horror, but sick like sick with boredom.

I personally am not a fan of sexual depictions, but thankfully this wasn't the focus of the story - and keeping in mind his usual demographic and the one targeted with this adaptation I do get the choices he made. Let the record show that this is a book that demands some form of self-blitzing (read: weed) to be even bearable, especially if you're a queerdo with complicated lady feelings, because Ito loves a booby and I do, too, but he also loves charring that booby and drawing the emaciated toothy corpse or drowning it and drawing it bloated and tongue-slugged, so. In a way, the focus lies on horror and visually disturbing images and I like it but sometimes it get exaggerated. It's a naturalistic and "literary" story compared to Junji Ito's usual supernatural horror fare - painful and sad where those stories are often shocking and funny and, yes, sometimes painful and sad.

I found there to be a tonal difference in this adaptation, where Yozo’s personal demons become more visual manifestations and more tangible horrors stalking his mind than the slow introspective deterioration into feeble self-hatred and an inability to fight back against it despite knowing he is eviscerating his own existence as it is represented in the book. I found this a nice touch, though the book still does address the Dazai/Yozo connection with a bit of fantastic fourth-wall breaking near the end. Growing up in an oppressive household, experiencing sexual trauma at a young age, a boy becomes a clown as a means of hiding all that is within him.