Haruko Ichikawa’s short story collection is an interesting anthology considering houseki no kuni and it’s dealings with rocky humans, as you will see in this article, her short stories unravel flesh in a clean bloodless manner and how it’s used to create different feelings through breaking them apart. One particular warning for the following section: there are depictions of trypophobia and again, warpings of the human body, while not extreme(that is one of my points) I still feel obligated to mention.
Kusaka siblings start with Kusaka Yukiteru dislocating his shoulder during a baseball match, causing him to lose the ability to do the one thing he’s best at. Getting surgery could help him, his school depends on his playing, but he doesn’t. Kusaka’s life until then has been a haze of loneliness through the lack of people there for him and an aunt who somewhat neglects him. Baseball was painful, a job, so when some shooting star takes the form of a little sister and enters his life, it becomes something important to him, a being to fill the missing parts of his life. Kusaka initially plays baseball for the fear of being abandoned, which spirals into his playing in the hope of one day exerting every ounce of his being to be free from it, until he just breaks.
Of course, as if an act of love, the shooting star decides to fix his fractured shoulder, despite Yukiteru’s want for company in his life. The unraveling of Yukiteru’s arm in this panel has become one of my favorites done by Ichikawa, the opening of his tendons, frail bones, stringy muscles, peeled skin, space rock unraveling his very flesh in surgical precision, all while a ring defines itself as a connection between shoulder and arm, stitching it together forever, and he faints. I’m not going to go any further than this but this scene is a marvel with the added focus of hands built throughout the short story, making a beautifully cathartic experience portraying the essence of just being there for one another. Haruko Ichikawa has that “one scene” where she wordlessly communicates the transformation of a limb into something that isn’t, and ends it near after with the taste of the transformation still lingering after finishing each work, I’d say that kusaka siblings exemplify this best.
A lunar funeral starts with a young man taking the wrong train and ending up in a small rural town deciding to run away from his empty promised life, and meeting a strange man named Aida who takes him in as his brother, knowing the young man’s unwillingness to go back. The man starts living his life as Yomichi(night street) with Aida for the time being, running on some request from the strange man to search for some remote control or something like that… After some time it seems that Aida’s gotten sick, and while convalescing with Yomichi taking care of him, a button plinks across the wooden floor, of course inspecting it shows leather on one side with gold on the other, with silver white stripes in the middle, a very expensive looking button, but, that’s-
not a button, but a piece of Aida
Organs, organs pulsate through his punctured torso, his flaking exterior that connects his interior, outlines of button shaped circular flesh sprawled across his hips. A machine of organs, displayed to us through holes. Apparently he’s some lunarian prince boy of some civilization dying cause of this hole disease or whatever, they’re just organs now. When I first read this scene I was astounded by the organic nature of it, Ichikawa building the scene from the page before, giving us microscopic details before hitting us with the horror of this incomplete aquarium of a man whose organs feel the same air that filters through his skin. Similar to the previous short story, the connecting thread woven into each short is her obsession with messing with the human body, similar to the destruction of rocks in houseki no kuni, but this time actualised in the form of flesh, the body in the form of lightning, a living manifestation of a finger, and the organic nature of an android being, Ichikawa manages to make them as unnervingly beautiful as she could.
25 hour vacation follows scientist Otome and her brother Koutarou as they take a nice short vacation where they are going to take photos of sea creatures only found in the shallows at 25 o’clock. When they were kids, Koutarou had his eye stabbed by a shovel after falling from a tree, coloring his left eye bloody red, now of course, he’s a photographer, and his sister is a scientist with the eccentric characteristic of judging others verbally through scores. Well, that is unimportant here because they’re at a lighthouse by the sea to take pictures of some rare unknown specimen. During the session though, it is revealed that Otome, eccentric that she is, consumed the bacteria they experimented on, causing her innards to be hollowed out, leaving only her exterior, being the current existence that is her.
25 hour vacation has a lot more to this but I’m just going to leave it at that, as that is not the “one scene” that the other short stories contain. 25 hour vacation feels the most casual out of Ichikawa’s works, the reveal is treated as something natural and waved off by Otome as nothing serious in contrast to Aida’s(lunar funeral guy) turning into a pile of organs. This short story definitely feels like the outlier of the whole collection, being the only one with two parts and it’s unique(in context of the collection) story structure, but I feel the work’s strength lies in the collective atmosphere of the short story. The ocean is an entire different world on its own compared to the rectangular architecture of Ichikawa’s interior design, accentuating the relaxed juxtaposition of the horrific situation.
Ichikawa uses surroundings to give focus to her characters in the best way possible, warping colors, perspective, and page turns used to accentuate whatever experience her characters feel to us and then undercutting it with some snarky remark. I do think Ichikawa’s main strength is treating uncomfortable experiences with normalcy to the point that it isn’t as discomforting as it was before. 25 hour vacation does this most explicitly in my opinion, because of it’s two part structure that lets the situation simmer in easier compared to the rest, and while the other short stories treat these situations with some sort of importance, they are also somewhat casual about it, causing an intentional disruption of empathy through framing, remember the last two examples, there’s a lack of blood, a component that triggers our feelings of disgust, causing us to care for the cause of the characters rather than feeling the importance of their mutilations when even they don’t seem to take it as seriously, but even still, we care about their causes, and with ichikawa’s writing we are still able to relate to them despite these somewhat inhumane responses, which I find honestly incredible.
Remember that remote in lunar funeral? Yeah that blew up the moon, Yomichi leaving to find a cure for Aida’s disease after finding the remote, stands tired on his journey, an exhaustion overwhelmed by the flash of light rapturing across his skin, witnessing one of the most beautiful double spread pages ever, broken meteoric shards splatter across the page as if viewed as its own spherical globe, contrasted with the simplistic shadows of sticks and man that pale in its beauty. This spread connects everything I’ve talked about so far, unnerving beauty mixed with the transformation of something you see everyday undercut by some fade to white. At the end of it all, I think Ichikawa’s art captures beauty in places hard to find, morphing something appalling to alluring, carrying those ideas to her later work, to create something truly magnificent.
All illustrations by Haruko Ichikawa, cleaned and typeset by me, scans originate from lovely strange dark scans on mangadex
