Junji Ito’s “Moan”: Six Stories of Terror

October arrived with a gift on my doorstep—Junji Ito‘s latest collection, Moan. Perfect timing, really. Nothing says Halloween season quite like cracking open a fresh dose of Ito’s particular brand of nightmare fuel.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while you know I am a massive Ito fan. The man’s been haunting readers since 1987, turning dental technician skills into an uncanny ability to render the human form in its most grotesque states. He’s earned his title as “the Stephen King of Japan,” racked up four Eisner Awards, got inducted into the Eisner Hall of Fame just this past July, and sold over 10 million books worldwide. The guy knows horror. But what makes Moan interesting is that these aren’t new stories—they’re from about a decade ago, originally published in Japan’s Masterpiece Collection back in 2013. To the best of my knowledge, most of them were never translated into English until now. VIZ Media finally brought them over courtesy of translator Jocelyne Allen (who also did Ito’s award-winning Frankenstein adaptation), and I’m glad they did.

This hardcover collection packs six tales into 272 pages. At $25, it’s priced consistently with other releases in VIZ’s Junji Ito Story Collection series, and it’s the penultimate volume in the Masterpiece Collection series—only Statues remains. The stories range from folk horror to body horror, from psychological dread to straight-up vampire madness. Some hit like a freight train. Others… well, we’ll get to that.

But first, the important part:

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING ⚠️

Everything beyond this point spoils the hell out of all six stories in the collection. If you want to experience Ito’s twisted imagination fresh, stop reading now and go pick up the book. Seriously. I’m about to ruin every surprise, every reveal, every grotesque twist. Skip ahead to My Honest Review if you want a spoiler free rundown.

The Stories: Immerse Yourself in Relentless Dread

1. Supernatural Transfer Student

This one kicks off the collection with a delightfully weird blend of horror and dark humor, and honestly? It’s brilliant. We’re in a rural Japanese school (definitely not a city, probably some small town nestled against mountains and forests) where a group of kids have formed a supernatural club. You know the type—kids obsessed with ghosts and psychic powers, trying to impress each other with parlor tricks. One boy, the star of the group, excels at bending spoons in front of the others to showcase his supposed psychic prowess. The girls eat it up.

Then Tukano arrives. New transfer student. Weird kid. His hobby? Walking around forests and finding weird stuff. That’s it. That’s what he enjoys doing with his free time. The supernatural club invites him to join, and that’s when things get properly strange.

Because Tukano doesn’t just claim to find weird things—he actually does. Eyeball stalk flowers that pop up from nowhere. A heretofore unknown waterfall that comes crashing and roaring down the mountain, its waters possessing the ability to boost psychic abilities. And he exposes the spoon-bending kid as a fraud, shaming him in front of everyone.

The club implodes. Students turn on each other. Suspicion and jealousy fester. And then they start disappearing.

The spoon-bending boy? Disappears after being led to believe that standing in the waterfall can give him real psychic powers. They find him drowned at the bottom of the waterfall, his body washed into a giant chasm below. Then more students vanish. A lake suddenly appears behind the school with a giant prehistoric monstrosity lurking in its depths (because of course it does).

The story culminates with the drowned boy returning as a psychic zombie—bloated, cut up, bruised from being slammed against sharp rocks, absolutely grotesque in the way only Ito can render. It’s revealed that one of his former club mates pushed him into the waterfall out of jealousy. Then we get a battle between psychically enhanced teens while Tukano watches like a spectator enjoying a show. The girls freak out. Eventually, Tukano grows bored and leaves town, and everything returns to normal.

Except for all the dead children he left in his wake.

The art in this story is suitably eerie and at times genuinely disturbing. That bloated zombie corpse is nightmare fuel—Ito’s attention to the details of decomposition and injury never fails to unsettle. This story captures that folk horror flavor that permeates so much of Ito’s work, where the Japanese countryside itself becomes complicit in the horror. Strong opener.

2. Moan (The Title Story)

And here we get to the main event, the story that gives the collection its name. “Moan” (also known as “The Groaning Drain”) is visceral body horror wrapped around themes of obsession, cleanliness, and revenge. This one even got a live-action film adaptation back in 2004, and after reading it, I can see why.

Two sisters, both beautiful, both obsessed with cleanliness. One is stalked by this absolutely repulsive boy named Numei—shabby appearance, pimply face, horrible teeth, bad body odor, just utterly disheveled. He waits for her after school every single day. She screams at him, insults him, rejects him viciously, but he won’t give up because he’s in love with her.

Then we meet their mother. And oh, she’s something else. A cleanliness freak who scrubs her hands every five minutes, gives the housekeeper hell with constant cleaning demands, and makes her daughters take showers constantly. The house is immaculate. Obsessively so.

A plumber gets called in because one of the drains is clogged. He finds the pipes full of hair, grease, and soap. But the mother berates him so badly—chews him out for even suggesting the problem might be related to their excessive washing—that he refuses to come back.

We also meet their father. Estranged, divorced, older. He misses his daughters desperately and asks to visit, but they refuse because their mother won’t allow it.

The younger sister decides to play a cruel trick on Numei. She invites him to their house where the mother proceeds to throw rotten eggs at him because she can’t stand his dirty appearance. Poor Noomay is humiliated, tricked, made a public spectacle. A real rage builds in him.

That night, someone climbs over the fence, opens a window, breaks in. The mother beats them to death with a baseball bat, thinking it’s a burglar. It’s their father. He just wanted to see his daughters. The killing is ruled an accident—the mother and girls all testify they thought it was a burglar.

The housekeeper tries to clean the blood stain off the floor. She can’t. It won’t disappear.

And then the drains start acting up again. Clogged pipes. But now there’s a sound—a groaning, moaning sound coming from the pipes. One of the sisters insists it sounds like a person. At first they think it’s their father’s ghost, haunting them. But then it becomes clear: it’s Noomay. Somehow, Noomay has gotten into the pipes.

The story ends with murder, death, revenge, and extreme horror that I won’t completely spoil, but let’s just say Ito fully commits to the grotesque implications of someone living in your drainage system. This is peak Ito—taking an everyday anxiety (strange sounds from your pipes, the fear of what’s in your drains) and twisting it into something utterly horrifying. The germaphobic mother’s obsession becomes her undoing in the most visceral way possible.

3. Blood Orb Grove

This is a vampire tale, Ito-style. Which means you can forget everything you think you know about vampires and prepare for something far stranger.

A young couple crashes their car after a blood fruit bursts on their windshield while they’re driving through a remote forest. The car’s totaled, but they survive. They need help, so they start walking toward the nearest village.

On the way, they encounter these kids. Groups of children who are exceedingly strange—impolite, evasive, not forthcoming about where the village is. As the couple continues searching for habitation, the kids start stalking them. Then the kids attack, whipping them with thorn branches. The girl starts bleeding, and that’s when things get truly weird: the kids jump on her and start sucking the blood from her wounds.

The couple fights them off and finally reaches the village, which appears deserted. Except for one sole inhabitant: a handsome young man who invites them in and bandages the girl’s wounds. That night, he tells them his story.

His love had this fear—an irrational terror that her blood wanted to leave her body. Eventually, she tried to commit suicide by cutting her throat. But instead of dying, a weird flesh-like branch started growing from the wound in her neck, full of blood blossoms that look like giant pulsating blood plums. She became desiccated, but the tree kept growing.

Unable to let her go, he brought her to this abandoned village. The couple falls asleep (drugged, naturally). When the boy wakes up and starts exploring, he discovers the truth: there’s a blood blossom grove inside the house. All the village’s inhabitants were transformed into these blood blossom plants—plants in human form.

The children outside? They survived by eating the fruit of their own blood blossoms when the infection spread. It saved them from becoming trees, but it turned them into vampires who crave blood.

The next day, the kids attack the house to steal the blood blossoms. The young host systematically kills them with a pitchfork. And then, inevitably, blood blossoms start growing from the young couple’s bodies as well.

This story showcases Ito’s talent for taking familiar horror tropes (vampires) and making them utterly alien and disturbing. The imagery of blood blossom trees, of people transformed into grotesque plant-human hybrids, of children turned into blood-craving creatures—it’s nightmare logic made flesh. Another banger. The first three stories in this collection are absolutely brilliant.

4. Flesh-Colored Mystery

Body horror at its finest. This one previously appeared in English way back in ComicsOne’s 2001 collection Flesh-Colored Horror, making it the only previously translated tale in the bunch. But it’s worth revisiting.

A young kindergarten teacher has a student with a strange skin condition. His name is Chikara, and he looks almost reptilian—scaly skin, no hair, weird eyes. He’s violent, stronger and bigger than the other kids, and he constantly bullies and tortures them.

One night while walking home, the teacher gets attacked by a woman who throws some kind of substance on her. It clings to her skin and hair so badly she has to cut her hair short, much to her students’ amusement.

Problems with Chikara continue. He assaults boys, tears down classroom art projects, becomes increasingly uncontrollable. When his “mother” comes to pick him up, the teacher approaches her, only to discover this woman is actually his aunt.

The teacher gets invited to their house to meet the boy’s real mother, who’s constantly taking showers, constantly wet with a towel wrapped around her head. The wallpaper throughout the house is completely destroyed—they blame Chikara, but the boy is clearly unhappy, clearly suffering.

Then Chikara literally tears the skin off another boy’s face at school. He’s expelled but keeps returning, peeking through windows, freaking everyone out.

Eventually, the horrifying truth emerges: the two women are sisters engaging in alchemical experiments. The boy’s father was an alchemist who discovered a procedure involving a weird type of clay. Cover the body in it, and when the person is freed from the clay husk, they become immortal.

They’ve been experimenting on little Chikara, torturing him with this process repeatedly. It doesn’t work, so they keep ripping the clay off, making him look inhuman. That’s why he’s in such a depressed, dour state—he’s being tortured by his own family in their pursuit of immortality.

When the teacher can’t stand it anymore, she confronts them at their house. She’s captured. They’re going to experiment on her. And then it’s revealed: the flesh they’re wearing is loose, like body bags. They long ago lost the skin on their bodies—they’re just muscle and empty flesh without skin.

The story culminates with the little boy saving his teacher (grateful for her kindness) in a scene involving acid. I won’t spoil more than that, but it’s suitably horrific.

This story works because it starts with a mystery (why does this child look so strange?) and slowly peels back layers to reveal something far more disturbing than you expected. The domestic horror angle—family members torturing a child for their own demented purposes—hits differently than supernatural threats. Another excellent tale.

5. Near Miss

And here’s where the collection stumbles. This is my least favorite story, and honestly, it feels underbaked compared to everything that came before.

It’s about a group of friends whose buddy was supposed to arrive on a flight. The flight crashed and disappeared. So they get in their own little Cessna and fly to find the crash site, since authorities don’t seem to know where it went down.

While flying back over a mountainous forested region, they’re nearly smashed out of the sky by a huge airliner. As they evade it, they fly close enough to see passengers through the windows—including their dead friend. All the passengers have this look of quiet acceptance: dull-eyed, lifeless.

It’s a ghost plane. The spirit of the plane that crashed, heading toward its final destination. Which might be hell.

That’s… it. That’s the whole story.

The concept is creepy enough—a ghost plane full of dead passengers flying toward damnation—but it feels rushed. There’s no real buildup, no character development, no time for dread to accumulate. It’s over almost before it begins. After the meaty, complex narratives of the first four stories, this feels like a sketch rather than a complete tale. Disappointing.

6. Under the Ground

The final story is also one of the weaker entries, though it’s better than “Near Miss.” It’s got that classic Ito twist ending, at least.

A group of former high school classmates reunite after 20 years. Their old school is hosting a reunion—dinner, drinks, nostalgia, reminiscing about the good old days, marveling at how everyone’s changed. They’re also unearthing a time capsule they buried two decades ago.

While the capsule is being dug up, two women talk about their school days. They mention that each student had to write a letter to someone that got placed in the capsule. One woman asks the other, “Who did you write yours to?”

“Kumi Shinoda.”

The first woman is shocked. Kumi Shinoda was the most unlikable girl in the class. Harsh critic, no friends, bitchy to everyone. Nobody wanted anything to do with her. The day before the time capsule was buried, before graduation, Kumi disappeared after being shouted out of class by her classmates who’d finally had enough of her.

But the woman who wrote to Kumi admits something strange: Kumi has been phoning her over all these years. They’ve kept in touch. Kumi talks mostly about the old days, complaining about students and teachers and school life, just like she used to.

Then the time capsule is unearthed.

Inside: the desiccated, dried husk of Kumi Shinoda’s corpse. Her skeletal hand clutching a phone—a phone she’d been using to dial her former classmate over all these many years.

This one’s creepy in concept—the idea that you’ve been talking to a corpse for two decades is genuinely unsettling—but again, it feels rushed. There’s not enough buildup, not enough time spent with these characters to make the reveal truly devastating. It’s a solid twist, executed adequately, but it lacks the slow-building dread that makes Ito’s best work so effective.

My Honest Review

So where does Moan land in the Ito pantheon?

It’s a strong collection, no question. The first three stories—”Supernatural Transfer Student,” “Moan,” and “Blood Orb Grove”—are absolute bangers. They showcase everything Ito does best: folk horror atmosphere, grotesque body horror, psychological dread, and that peculiar ability to make the mundane (drains, forests, remote villages) feel threatening. “Flesh-Colored Mystery” is also excellent, even if it’s been available in English before.

But the last two stories, “Near Miss” and “Under the Ground,” don’t quite measure up. They’re not terrible—Ito’s worst is still better than most horror creators’ best—but they feel underdeveloped. Like sketches rather than fully realized narratives. After the meaty, complex stories that precede them, they’re a bit of a letdown.

That said, Ito’s art remains absolutely stunning throughout. The man never loses his ability to render the grotesque in uniquely disturbing ways. That bloated corpse in “Supernatural Transfer Student,” the implications of what’s in those drains in “Moan,” the blood blossom trees in “Blood Orb Grove,” the skinless women in “Flesh-Colored Mystery”—every page demonstrates why Ito’s visual storytelling is unmatched in horror manga.

What strikes me most about this collection is how it captures that Japanese folk horror flavor. Most of these stories are set in rural or suburban Japan—forests, small towns, isolated villages. Ito uses the Japanese countryside itself as a character, a place where the supernatural feels not just possible but inevitable. There’s something about the way he depicts these settings—the detailed backgrounds, the realistic rendering of Japanese architecture and landscapes—that makes the horror hit harder. It’s grounded and surreal simultaneously.

The stories also showcase Ito’s range. You get supernatural phenomena (“Supernatural Transfer Student”), visceral body horror (“Moan,” “Flesh-Colored Mystery”), creature horror (“Blood Orb Grove”), and psychological dread (“Under the Ground”). Even the weaker stories demonstrate his ability to conjure unsettling imagery and atmosphere.

And really, that’s what you’re buying when you pick up an Ito collection: atmosphere. The assurance that you’re going to see something that’ll stick in your brain long after you close the book. These aren’t stories that explain themselves or provide comfort. Ito refuses to hold your hand. He presents nightmare logic and lets it speak for itself.

The hardcover format is gorgeous, with the eye-catching cover featuring imagery from the title story. At 272 pages for $25, it’s a solid value. Translation by Jocelyne Allen maintains the tone and atmosphere of Ito’s original work—I didn’t notice any clunky phrasing or awkward dialogue that sometimes plagues manga translations.

If you’re already an Ito devotee, Moan is essential. It’s the penultimate volume in VIZ’s project to bring the complete Masterpiece Collection to English speakers, and it contains stories most Western readers have never encountered before.

For newcomers to Ito’s work, this collection actually serves as a decent introduction. The six stories showcase his range without requiring any prior knowledge. You can pick this up having never read Ito before and get a comprehensive sampling of what he does. Though honestly, if you’re completely new to his work, I’d still recommend starting with Uzumaki or Tomie—those are his masterworks for a reason.

The Wrap-Up

I’d give Moan a solid 4 out of 5. The first four stories are strong enough to carry the collection despite the weaker final two tales. It’s not Ito’s best work—that remains Uzumaki in my opinion—but it’s a worthy addition to any horror fan’s collection.

The timing is perfect for Halloween season. I finished reading it in October, and there’s something appropriate about experiencing Ito’s particular brand of dread as the nights get longer. Just maybe avoid reading “Moan” right before taking a shower. Trust me on this one. You’ll start hearing sounds in your drains that you never noticed before, and once you start questioning what’s actually in those pipes, well… that’s exactly where Ito wants your mind to go.

Pick it up if you’re ready to be unsettled, if you want to see the grotesque rendered with meticulous artistic skill, if you’re okay with stories that refuse to explain themselves or provide closure. This is horror that lingers, that makes everyday things (drains, forests, reunions) feel threatening long after you’ve closed the book.

And honestly? In an era where so much horror feels sanitized or explained to death, Ito’s refusal to comfort readers feels necessary. He understands that true horror lies in the inexplicable, in obsession taken to its logical extreme, in the ordinary twisted just enough to reveal the abyss beneath.

Moan won’t revolutionize your understanding of Ito if you’re already familiar with his catalog, but it absolutely delivers on the promise of unsettling, beautifully grotesque horror. Sometimes that’s exactly what you need—six stories that’ll make you moan from both laughter at the absurdist elements and genuine visceral dread.