Junji Ito’s SOICHI is a terrifying celebration of that weird cousin we all have
For all the terror that Junji Ito conjures throughout his stories (even the cat one), there’s a fair amount of dark comedy to go around with it. When Ito wants to be funny, he’s funny. But it’s never without a healthy dose of weird to go along with it. Oddly enough, it’s a style that lends itself perfectly to stories about families. I mean, what is a family if not a dark comedy with a strange cast of characters that features at least one person that freaks everyone out.
This is what Ito’s Soichi is all about, a humorous look at a family that harbors enough horror to give you nightmares all while giving the weird cousin character his long overdue time in the spotlight.
Soichi is composed of 10 short stories featuring the titular character, a kid with a strange and macabre sense of humor that likes to torture his own family along with any visiting cousins that dare spend their vacations where he lives. To an extent, the book chronicles the strange life of Soichi, going from birthdays to elaborate myths concerning his grandmother and then to incidents concerning the creation of life-sized puppets that come alive to create havoc and spread discontent.
Explaining Soichi’s character can be quite tricky. It’s easy to label the kid as nothing more than a proverbial black sheep, the kind every family seems to have at least one of. He’s antisocial, scurries around the attic with the intention of loosening dirt so it falls on people eating below, claims to be able to tap into supernatural elements to torment those he sees fit, and he shoots nails from his mouth.
In the book’s first story, titled “A Happy Summer Vacation,” Soichi’s second cousins (Yusuke and Michina) come for a visit all the way from Tokyo, hoping to spend time with distant relatives they’ve never really had the chance to bond with. They find this part of the family to be the very picture of happiness and cordiality. But then they quickly find out that their son, Soichi, is the exact opposite of this. This kid trades all the brightness his parents and siblings exude and trades it in for doom and gloom. To Soichi’s chagrin, everyone loves the very pleasant Yusuke and Michina. He finds them annoying. So, he responds in kind by creating voodoo dolls in their likeness to visit as much misfortune upon them as possible.
While reading this first story, I half-expected the family to be revealed as Satanists that openly worshipped the Dark Lord before every meal. But they weren’t. They were the perfect relatives, the kind everyone wants. It made no sense that this family was responsible for creating such a dark cloud of a human being without an equal within the unit. Therein lies the genius behind these stories.
Because Soichi’s family doesn’t share in his darkness, Soichi becomes relatable. He might be annoying and aggressively unlikeable, but he’s also part of a family that represents everything he’s not. He’s the grungy teen, the headbanger, the metalhead, and the horror hound that every family has at least one of. This is apparent in the way Ito illustrates him.
Soichi is extremely thin, almost to the point of looking sickly. He almost always in a slouch and he has black bags under his eyes to denote a lack of sleep, as if he was destined from the start to be a creature of the night. It’s important that he doesn’t look entirely unwell, though. He’s not neglected by his family or abused. He’s just not like them, making it hard to justify spending quality time with them. He likes to dress in black and he sticks to corners and shadows. Sharing in family events is an obligation to be skirted for him.
While his pranks and snarky remarks go too far (remember the voodoo dolls?), I couldn’t help but feel sad he doesn’t have another likeminded sibling or aunt or cousin to share his darkness with (an idea that comes up in a later story concerning a possible twin brother that no one else can see other than his equally ghoulish grandmother).
Anyone who’s ever tried to convey the excitement of watching George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead or how listening to Black Sabbath can be life-changing to family members whose automatic response is a disgusted scoff or a throwaway comment on why they’ll never get why people watch horror movies will feel a connection with Soichi.
Ito amplifies this by not turning his family into a scarier and more twisted version of The Addams Family. Soichi doesn’t have a sister like Wednesday or a brother like Pugsly. Hell, he doesn’t even have a Cousin It. He has a painfully normal family that is nothing like him. In truth, Soichi just needs someone who prefers to view life for the terror it is. Views contrary to that are simply alien to him, much like his family.
Soichi will mean different things to different readers, but something that’s indisputable about the character is how much of an outsider he is. He doesn’t care that no one likes him, or that his cousins would rather keep their interactions with him to a minimum. His world is his own, though. He apologizes for none of it. His plans might backfire each time, but he’s true to himself. And then there’s the creeping idea that Ito masterfully sneaks in to make readers consider a very basic fact: every family has their own Soichi, and it might be you. If that’s the case, just be you. But maybe try not to go overboard with the voodoo dolls and the nails.
