PTSD Radio Vol. 1

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The artwork of the horror scenes always pop up right in your face with some really unnerving portrayals of paranoia-inducing oddities. It happens quite frequently as well, as the chapters are extremely short and always end with a bizarre twist. I wouldn’t say anything in here is truly terrifying, but it’s constantly eerie, atmospheric and visually uncomfortable. NAKAYAMA: There's no particular message. The commingling of past and present simply shows that wills can be connected across time and space. At the time of writing, I understand that Nakayama has put this series on indefinite hold due to health concerns...health concerns that are reminiscent enough of certain elements of this series that he's worried it's cursed. Seriously, look up "PTSD Radio on hiatus." That means, right now there's just one more collection to try and explain everything. I hope it does, because this is fantastic stuff, and I'd hate to leave the story hanging. But I also hope that Nakayama's health improves. I also hope we eventually get an English translation of Nakayama's other major series, Fuan no Tane, because I gather that one's still ongoing. And if it's anywhere near as good as this, I'm on board. What was the genesis of this project, the initial vision? Did you always plan to embed a larger mythos within the story?

NAKAYAMA: I often start by either making things slightly unbalanced or making them unnaturally neat. Sometimes I also include features that I personally find fundamentally, primally unsettling. For example, you know those perfect, straight teeth that Americans like so much? There's something about teeth like that, that have obviously been straightened, that disturbs me. I don't know why. An unseen hand tugs at your braid. You find an old box with only a tangled mess of dark hair inside. You open a door in your home only to witness a river of curls slinking away, an ominous lump at its heart. Like Junji Ito's Uzumaki, PTSD Radio takes something everyday and weaves it into a series of chilling, cryptic, twisted, repellant, and alluring manga stories that become more than what they first seem. A series of vaguely connected horror vignettes revolving around paranoia, urban legends and irrational fears coming to life in unexpected ways. Carried into modern Japan from a forgotten past, the being known as Ogushi haunts and tortures humans of all kinds. Little is know about Ogushi’s curse, except that it resides in an unexpected place: human hair.The impact, then, is double-edged. The brief propulsions of narrative, moving around and coming as they go without any resolution, carry a haunting effect in their saying, this is how the world is, everywhere, all the time; it can happen to anyone, and it does happen to everyone, and the world around you will not notice or care. On the other hand, its selection and prompt discarding of protagonists does not allow the author, or at least does not compel him, to develop his characters outside of their relationship to the overall plot, prompting the reader to ask if they should, in any sense beyond the aesthetic, care or be engaged in any active way. Creepy Doll: One story involves a group of kids finding a large sealed doll covered in hair... and whatever was bound to it is furious at being exorcized.

NAKAYAMA: When I was a kid, my uncle on my father's side got me and a bunch of my cousins together at my grandma's house to tell scary stories, and that's where my interest started. As a matter of fact, though, I'm quite the scaredy-cat! I can't bring myself to watch horror movies or TV horror series. I won't go into haunted houses, and I'm too scared by other horror manga to read anything but my own work! Maybe it's because I'm so readily scared that I'm so full of frightening ideas—it might be exactly what enables me to create these stories.Like Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, PTSD Radio takes something everyday and weaves it into a series of chilling, cryptic, twisted, repellant, and alluring manga stories that become more than what they first seem. PTSD Radio volumes 1-6 are currently available in print as three omnibus volumes from Kodansha Comics. You can read our review of the digital version here and in the Fall 2022 Manga Guide. The scariest fiction when you’re an adult is the strange stuff; the type of content that doesn’t make sense that can take average everyday things and make them weird in a moment’s notice. This makes sense of course since the things that scare us as children do exactly the same thing, but as an adult monsters are no longer horrifying mysteries. Enter a new manga from Kodansha Comics called PTSD Radio, which I dove into already confused by the cover and description only to finish reading it perplexed in the best of ways. So what’s it about? Cursed Item: A table, from which a ghost inexplicably emerges at night. When it is turned over to a monastery for inspection, the head priest immediately has it incinerated, and shows the owners several nails that had been imbedded in the wood. As he explains, it's likely the wood came from a tree used for ushi no toki mairi, turning it into a source of impurity and corruption.