My first exposure to Homunculus was through a Discord friend who posted a batch of Bleach volume cover edits — you’ve almost certainly seen the format somewhere before. I scrolled through them aimlessly when one of them caught my eye. It was an edit of a man wearing a beanie and a business suit staring at the camera with a falling leaf obscuring his face from view. From that moment onwards, I was hooked on Hideo Yamamoto’s visuals.
I’ve seen some people online describe Homunculus as “pretentious,” which I believe is reductive. There are a lot of descriptors I feel are appropriate for Homunculus. It’s weird. It’s surreal. It’s almost unceasingly bleak. At times, it’s shocking and disgusting (warning to anyone planning to read — the most notable instance of this is a highly dubious sex scene involving a minor). Other times, it’s gorgeous — one of its strongest attributes is Hideo Yamamoto’s art, which depicts the gorgeous and grotesque with equal detail and vibrancy. It can feel inaccessible because of how batshit fucking strange everything is, but I don’t think that makes it pretentious, per se. That might be because I’m a bit of a pretentious asshole myself, but I feel like Homunculus has a decent amount of stuff to say and a beautiful medium through which it’s conveyed.
Anyway, the actual content. Homunculus is a manga about Susumu Nakoshi, a homeless man who lives in his car. Each night, he parks his car on the edge of a park, which is overlooked by a large office building. The other hobos at the park assume that Nakoshi is somehow drawn to the office by his previous occupation. But they can’t figure out exactly what, because he lies to them pathologically. He is, literally and figuratively, a man living between two worlds.
But Nakoshi is offered a way out by Manabu Ito, a flamboyant medical student with a burgeoning interest in studying peoples’ psyches. He offers to pay Nakoshi a hundred grand in exchange for Nakoshi participating in a study which involves undergoing trepanation. For those who are not familiar with medieval European medical practices, trepanation is a process in which a hole is drilled in the skull. Ito believes it’ll decrease the pressure in the brain and awaken a sixth sense in Nakoshi, and after Nakoshi’s car gets towed, he has no choice but to accept. On the first day of his study, Ito takes Nakoshi to do some standard psychic shit, but shockingly nothing happens. On his way home, Nakoshi accidentally covers his right eye to rub dirt out of it and sees a man with a flattened head. When he opens his eye, the man returns back to normal. Nakoshi covers his eye again and sees a bunch of terrifying, seemingly monstrous figures, and ends up causing a yakuza boss, seen as a little boy hiding inside a giant robot, to cry. The next day, Ito informs him that his newfound psychic ability is to see homunculi, or visual representations of someone’s unconscious psyche. And it takes off from there.
The two main qualities of Homunculus I want to reiterate more than anything are its godlike art and its abject fucking weirdness. Fitting with the weird and surreal nature of the homunculi, many scenes are tense partially because of their abject strangeness. Early on in the story, Nakoshi uses his homuncu-vision on a homeless chef while they’re both pissing. The chef’s homunculus, a shiny, reflective egg, looks back at him through a hole while it pisses through another. Ito has a homunculus as well, and his arc leads to a bizarre but extremely tense (and at times homoerotic) confrontation. Nakoshi jacks off frequently during the story, both in flashbacks and in the present day, and occasionally eats his own, uhh, emissions. The final volume of the story includes a horrific but simultaneously hilariously weird sex scene. There is a lot of Freudian shit. If you’re a fan of Fire Punch, I Am A Hero, or Baki, I’ve found Homunculus is weird in a similar way. This weirdness can be to its detriment, as the final volume doesn’t conclude the story quite as smoothly as you’d hope, but I found the ending is both satisfying and slightly ambiguous. If you’re a fan of this sort of bizarrocore stuff, you’ve probably already read Homunculus. If not, it’s still worth reading for its art.
Hideo Yamamoto may be a bit of a psychopath, but his art skill is phenomenal. Excellently rendered cityscapes alternate with the characters and their homunculi, who are drawn in slightly grotesque detail, quite like the homunculi themselves. Honestly, this section is starting to sound really pretentious, and I’m not that much of an art guy. Yamamoto’s art is fucking good.
Homunculus isn’t perfect, but it has some damn good bits within the weirdness. The homunculi are a microcosm of the story itself — grotesque but deeply insightful. If you’re into weird manga, if you like psychological horror, or if you just want good art, Homunculus is worth a shot.