The Satirical Horror of Junji Ito’s Town of No Roads

[The following essay contains SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]

Of manga author Junji Ito’s innumerable masterpieces (including such long-running series as Tomie and Uzumaki and self-contained one-shots like The Enigma of Amigara Fault and The Hell of the Doll Funeral), Town of No Roads is probably his most flawed. Its sprawling, expansive themes strain against a narrative too narrow and restrictive to properly contain them, the central allegory and its orbiting metaphors often smothered by the concrete, literalist obligations of plot and genre. These blemishes, however, merely serve to make the work more compelling; even when it falls short of its ambitions, its message still resonates.

The story is, essentially, a triptych, revolving around three discrete yet loosely interconnected vignettes. In the first chapter, our protagonist—a young, innocent schoolgirl named Saiko—begins having strange, haunting dreams about a boy in her class. While she initially dismisses these visions as manifestations of a subconscious crush, she soon discovers that he may, in fact, be sneaking into her bedroom and whispering to her as she sleeps, hoping to hypnotically influence her romantic interest. Things take a dark turn when she confronts him about his nocturnal visits—but I’ll refrain from spoiling the twist here.

In the aftermath of this traumatic experience, Saiko’s home life rapidly deteriorates. Her family, suspecting that she’s been engaging in “morally loose” activities, becomes increasingly disrespectful of her personal space. She feels the judgmental gaze of her parents and siblings on her every hour of every day, peering through peepholes that seem to spontaneously appear in her walls and ceiling. Worse than the incessant voyeurism is the blatant gaslighting; her father, wearing a conspicuous eyepatch the morning after she angrily jabs a pencil through the gap in her doorway, insists that everything is perfectly fine (“I just have a stye; why would it be your fault?”)—that she is the only one behaving abnormally.

In the third part, our heroine finally escapes from her oppressive household, resolving to stay with her estranged aunt until she can financially support herself. Unfortunately, upon arriving at the titular town, she finds that the entire community has been enveloped by a massive, labyrinthine wooden structure. With the streets thoroughly obstructed, the locals are forced to open their residences to allow for pedestrian egress, sacrificing their own safety and security for the sake of public convenience. Saiko delves into the eerie, nightmarish mini-dystopia, desperate to reunite with her relative despite the bizarre circumstances—unaware of the true terrors lurking within.

The underlying meaning unifying these superficially disjointed snapshots is obvious—especially if you’re familiar with the old Japanese adage “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” Ito dramatically exaggerates the implicit values conveyed by the idiom—conformity, collectivism, and “purity” (particularly as it pertains to the chastity and propriety of women)—to chilling effect, imagining a suffocatingly repressive society governed by illogical, contradictory, hypocritical cultural norms, wherein privacy, individuality, and bodily autonomy have eroded to the point of nonexistence. A few extraneous details bloat the comic—a knife-wielding maniac whose sole purpose is to add a relatively conventional complication to an otherwise rather abstract conflict, multi-ocular monsters that are present primarily to satisfy the expectations of any mainstream horror fans in the audience—but these minor shortcomings neither diminish its emotional impact nor dull its razor-sharp satirical subtext; the ideas that it explores are simply too rich to be so easily diluted.

Ice Cream Bus, the tale that concludes the Junji Ito compilation in which Town of No Roads also appears (Alley, published in America by VIZ Media), is about an evil ice cream vendor that transforms children into the very sugary product he then peddles to subsequent victims—a Goosebumps style premise that borders on campy, absurdist comedy. Now that’s what I call artistic versatility!