Ah yes, it’s that time again. It’s time to return to the Junji Well to quench my everlasting thirst for quality horror manga. How many times has it been now? I suppose it matters not.
After all, every trip to the Junji Well may as well as be the first.
#Black Paradox#
Black Paradox is one of a select handful of horror manga by Junji Ito to be an actual series rather than an anthology of short stories. Worthy to note that some other entries of that handful while I would still call them series, they definitely feel like they could just be a bunch of different short stories just with lines connecting the dots.
I think the only ones I could compare Black Paradox with are Gyo and Hellstar Remina. Unlike both of those though, Black Paradox by the end manages to remain chugging along the rails while both Gyo and Hellstar Remina just fly right the fuck off and explode magnificently.
~~This is not flying off the rails in the world of Junji Ito.~~
Mind you, the typical insanity and strangeness of Junji Ito flows abound from Black Paradox all the same. It’s just that it remains a whole lot more stable. Also, it helps that it starts relatively simple. Giving it a lot of room to grow in insanity.
As while we start with a group that seems relatively normal going off into the woods to perform a group suicide, we very quickly veer off into weird territory. One repeatedly sees a doppelganger of himself staring at him from afar, one’s face is half disfigured from a hideous birthmark, one experiences odd premonitions of future events, and finally perhaps the weirdest of them all, there is a man who is committing suicide because he has an inferiority complex towards a robot.
A robot that his company built in his image to match the man exactly but still exceeds him due to being a robot.
Initially, I thought this manga was going to be some form of Groundhog’s Day hell where these wacky characters keep on trying to commit this group suicide yet something goes wrong to botch it every single time.
Instead, on the second try, the man who has a robot copy of himself vomits up a strange large round jewel upon taking the pills they intended to kill themselves with. And that of course leads this manga down an odd and twisted path as this suicide group becomes enraptured by the Paradoxical Night.
While there would certainly be a temptation present, I would probably be unsure about attempting to market jewels from some other strange world which occasionally have human souls coming out of them. But two of the members get rich off of the stones, and the days of them wishing for suicide quickly disappear behind them.
But a door thrust open is not so easily shut as the spread of Paradoxical Nights lead to effects they could have hardly imagined. And when someone obsessed with peering further into the realm Paradoxical Nights originate… things go horribly wrong.
#Bonus: The Licking Woman and Mystery Pavilion#
As with the case with other Junji Ito manga that focus on telling one extended story, Black Paradox also includes two additional Junji Ito short stories.
The Licking Woman is a full length Junji Ito short story. It's one of his ones that stray more towards "disgusting" than anything else. Because the idea of a strange woman just randomly pouncing upon you and licking you with absolutely no warning is a pretty weird and strange situation. But also, this is what her tongue looks like.
Yeah, no fucking thank you. Only in the Junjiverse would this happen.
"Everybody! We need team up together to trap and capture the Licking Woman! She's terrorizing the entire city! If she licks you, you're dead!"
It's a pretty good short story but yeah fuck it's disgusting.
Mystery Pavilion is a four page extra. Since it's only four pages, I'm reluctant to use the term "short story", but hey it's a full colored extra about a... mutant pelican? In Kazuo Umezu fashion, in this extra, the pelican has gone extinct and using the power of science, humanity has brought it back.
Yet it seems like whenever that happens in something...
It goes horribly wrong.
#Conclusion#
Black Paradox was real enjoyable. Still possesses a fair amount of Junji Ito craziness but remains relatively grounded. Whereas you know, Hellstar Remina was just dialed up to 100% insanity. Which has its own charms for sure, but I actually really liked the characters of Black Paradox and how they changed following the discovery of Paradoxical Night.
An 8 out of 10.
