REVIEW: Hauntress (manga) by Minetaro Mochizuki, translated by Annelise Ogaard

Hauntress is a horror manga. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Hiroshi, a college student, overhears someone repeatedly ringing his neighbor Yamamoto's doorbell late one evening. He opens his apartment door out of annoyance and curiosity, and sees that the person is an extremely tall, long-haired woman with dirty shoes and a scar on her wrist. He talks to her briefly and then tries to go back to bed, but she spends the entire night continuing to try to get Yamamoto to answer.

Unfortunately for Hiroshi, it doesn't stop there. The woman, Sachiko, turns up at his door, hoping to find Yamamoto hiding in his place. He lets her use his phone to call Yamamoto, who still doesn't pick up and probably isn't even home, only for her to contact him later, telling him that she left her bag at his place. Sachiko becomes even more persistent, transferring her obsession with Yamamoto to Hiroshi.

While there's not really a whole lot to this story, I thought it was nicely creepy. The flow of the panels occasionally seemed to be a bit off, making some of the action harder to follow than it should have been, but overall I thought the story was well done, and the somewhat off-putting aspects of the artwork fit the tone.

I wasn't really sure what to think of a lot of the characters, including Hiroshi. He had a crush on a high school student, Rumi (who smiled a lot, with what, to me, seemed like a disturbing number of teeth), and his reactions initially had me wondering whether I'd misunderstood and he was actually a high school student too. But no, he was definitely in college. Then there was the revelation that he and his friends had bullied a girl when they were younger.

Then there was Sachiko herself. I still have no clue what that phone call at the end meant. Who was she talking to? Was there actually a reason behind her actions, or did she really just start obsessing over Hiroshi just because he happened to be there? 

The lack of any sort of answers bugged me a bit, but I was more bothered by a bone-headed decision Hiroshi made early on in the story. Would a guy in 1993 (or any time) really have told a clearly slightly "off" stranger where his spare key was, just so that he could avoid going home to get her bag for her? His excuse was that he didn't have anything worth stealing - it apparently didn't occur to him that she might make a copy of his key (which she absolutely did).

Hiroshi's idiocy aside, I really did enjoy the overall creepiness of this. 

Extras:

The first four pages are included in full color.