In Japan, the name Kazuo Umezu is as synonymous with horror as Stephen King is with it here in the U.S., although Umezu’s medium is manga, rather than prose.
His body of work spans three decades and has proven the source of several film and TV adaptations, and he was even asked to curate a haunted-house exhibit bearing his name at a Tokyo amusement park. He’s also something of a peculiar celebrity, only wearing horizontally striped sweaters, regarded as a source of good luck to neighbors who spot him (according to an article by author Patrick Macias), and he recently was taken to court by neighbors seeking to stop him from painting his house in his signature red and white stripes.
Kazz, as he’s known, has been making inroads in Western markets with the recent translation of his signature series from the ’70s, The Drifting Classroom, about an entire grade school that disappears from Japan during an earthquake, only to appear in a bizarre wasteland where teachers and students immediately begin breaking down.
While well-received volumes of Drifting Classroom continue to appear on U.S. shelves, IDW Publishing looks back even further in Kazz’s career and assembles a trio of stories that they’ve released under the title Reptilia.
These are a loosely connected trilogy of snake-woman stories by Umezu from the ’60s, drawn in a slightly more abstracted style than that of Drifting Classroom (Umezu’s work at that point resembled Osama Tezuka’s to a point, only with a great deal more blacks and sharper, more realistic details, particularly on the adults).
It’s pretty remarkable how current the stories seem, given that they’re around 40 years old. The tales read like a mixture of traditional Asian ghost stories about shape-changing animal spirits combined with a 1980s slasher-hero horror-movie franchise vibe, particularly in the latter stories, in which the mythology grows more complex, evoking screenwriters thinking of new ways to bring Freddy or Jason or whomever back.
More strikingly, the tales are packed with the sorts of images we now associate with post-Ring J-horror films, including women and girls in robes and nightgowns rising up from unlikely places. One of the more frightening visuals Umezu provides is women falling to the ground and then gliding along it like snakes.
In the first story, a little girl’s mother seemingly returns from the hospital, only she’s actually been replaced by a snake woman with a taste for little girls. Only the girl knows the truth, and she can’t convince anyone else of it. That’s followed by a sequel, in which the same girl goes to spend the summer in a remote village with her cousins, a village which the same snake lady takes over, converting other villagers into human snakes through vampire-like transmission of the cures. The volume ends with a sort of prequel, explaining where the original snake lady came from.
As in Classroom, the terrorized protagonists here are all children, and Umezu demonstrates his ability to zero in on the insecurities of children and exploit them in such a way that makes adult readers remember the world through the eyes of a child, and freak the hell out at what it is they see.