Scary Book 3: Faces

By Kazuo Umezu

Each installment of the Scary Book series explores the horror in its title theme. The first book, Reflections, explored what happens on the other side of the looking glass, and what happens when a young girl’s reflection breaks into our world. The second book, Insects, dug into a girl’s irrational fear of butterflies, and revealed a twisted tale of abuse and murder. This is the third installment in the Scary Book series and the title theme is Faces.

Two full-length stories are included in this volume, and both explore society’s attitudes about physical beauty. “Fear” is the first story and opens with the tale of two sisters. Momoko is worshipped as a natural cutie by anyone who lays eyes on her. Her plainer younger sister, Aiko, is summarily ignored into almost non-existence as they grew up. (Though, in fact, it’s hard to distinguish much difference in the two, besides hair-styles, thanks to Umezu’s art work. All his female leads tend to look alike, which adds an interesting twist to this story.) Just as the sisters enter high school and Momoko starts a relationship with the dreamy Takaya, Momoko trips and falls down the stairs, scarring her perfect face to an unrecognizable state. How the story plays out is shocking and sad, and it shows a richer exploration of the societal pressures (both real and created in Momoko’s head) than we have seen in earlier volumes. The extremes the sisters go to fix Momoko’s mangled mug are horrifying, but the ending is the most unsettling.

The second story, which takes up about 2/3 of the volume, is titled “The Coincidental Letter”. This story opens with the story of another young girl, Yoko, waking up late to school. (Does Umezu ever have boys as the lead characters?) This leads to a downward spiral of a terrible day for Yoko, and she proceeds to air all her frustrations in a letter addressed to the target of frustration, her teacher. She writes things like “A woman like you will never get married…”, “Your legs are crippled…”, and “You’ll fall off a cliff…” among other comments of her ugliness and lack of popularity. But instead of sending the letter to the teacher, she makes up a random address in Hokkaido and tosses it in the mailbox. This leads to a series of coincidences, as the address was a real address, and the recipient, Suzuko Yamada, was actually crippled, but about to be married. The letter throws Yamada into a suicidal depression, and her sudden disappearance becomes a national news item. The country wants to know where Suzuko Yamada is, and who wrote that horrible letter. “The Coincidental Letter” has elements of horror, but isn’t a horror story in the same way as the earlier Umezu stories are. Like “Fear” it explores elements of the human condition we don’t often see in horror manga.

Umezu goes in a slightly different direction with Scary Book: Faces, and I think it is to the reader’s benefit. The artwork maintains Umezu’s distinctive style. He has a way of turning the cute into the grotesque with a few pen strokes, and the distinct faces of the main characters are kept under wraps for just the right amount of time, so that turn of the page will elicit a gasp as big as if each girl were standing right in front of you.

This is the third book in the Scary Book series, and, at this point, there are no future volumes scheduled to publish. We do enjoy this series, and hope Dark Horse continues bring us Umezu in English, even if just as a yearly Halloween treat.