PTSD Radio 1 (Vol. 1-2): Omnibus (PTSD Radio 2-in-1)

Product Information

NAKAYAMA: There's no particular message. The commingling of past and present simply shows that wills can be connected across time and space. What's It About? There exists an entity lurking in the shadows. It will grasp victims by their hair and pull them down, down to their death. You can see it out of the corner of your eye, its grasping hands from the streets below or shadows cast on the street. It's unknown whether its a god, a curse, or a psychosis.

Ghostly Goals: A girl keeps waking up in the middle of the night, seeing a vague, inhuman mouth panting at her side, exhaling a foul-smelling breath. Despite this, the presence also pulls her from crossing a dangerous road, leaving her confused as to what it is and what it wants. Later, it drags her to the family kitchen just in time to see a fire start and for her father to douse the flames. Then she realizes the mysterious ghost is a dog - the late pet of the former owner. She makes sure his grave will be left untouched and thanks him for the help, now sure it's nothing but helpful. This is a weird, sort of disjointed manga of short stories featuring different people in a city or town, that’s affected by a curse or an evil after an idol/totem was destroyed.

Demonic Dummy: A straw dummy that might be possessed by the God of Hair (or might be one of its forms) appears. Surreal Horror: Horrible things happen to people for no discernible reason they can understand... the problem is, those horrors often turn out to have their own logic, which doesn't mesh with human understanding. the stories we've shared are connected in some way?" directly within its dialogue. But it still mostly Faces that are preternaturally symmetrical, like on a mannequin, are also unsettling. I couldn't give you a reason, but it's something that reaches very deep. By the same token, if you take an image that's stable and balanced and upset that balance even slightly, that can be creepy. Try it and see. You know Hello Kitty, right? Her face is basically a mirror image, left and right. Take one of her eyes, just one of them, and make it 0.1 mm larger. It suddenly looks very weird. 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.

Now as for the rumors, this is what really happened with Masaaki Nakayama. According to the extra chapters included in volumes 5 and 6 of PTSD Radio, he indeed started to experience strange occurrences. However, the source of them is not the manga itself, but the office he used as a studio for its production. These stories may seem random, but they all begin making sense once the hair totem and Ogushi myth begin to take shape. Long story short, a town in Japan had a shrine to Ogushi that was paid tribute to with human hair. A curse seemed to befall the town after World War II, wherein a Japanese soldier failed to bring one of his deceased comrades' hair to the shrine. This included Nakayama himself, as one side of his face suddenly swelled up like a balloon and his temperature dropped...yet when he rewrote his idea to say no more, he suddenly felt fine. I loved the story ideas surrounding body horror and dark imagery. The hair and the dark shadows have stayed particularly vivid in my mind. Traumatic Haircut: Done to a young girl in a rural village, though apparently as some kind of ritualistic safety precaution by her family, to stop the "god of hair" from taking it, and threatened towards a strange transfer student by a gang of bullies. Later on, there are indicia that it's a very old tradition, that has something to do with the ultimate source of whatever's happening.

Reviews

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.