Fuan no Tane - Seeds of Anxiety

Title: Fuan no Tane
Story & Art: Nakayama Masaaki
Volumes: 3
Genre: Seinen

Fuan no Tane (Seeds of Anxiety) is a collection of stories that centers around urban legends, ghosts and supernatural stuff from Japan. I'm not really familiar with most of them, except that some of the ghost stories are pretty much what you hear from old people. (At the very least, we have our own versions of those stories...you get my drift.)

Most of the stories are short (2-pages long) so I got the feeling that there should be more to it than what I read. Although, that's what makes these kinds of stories enjoyable, right? They leave you hanging ^_^;

There isn't anything spectacular about the drawing style of Fuan no Tane. The characters look average - even unattractive. The ghosts and creatures aren't what we normally see in horror movies; they aren't gruesome or scary at all. Well, I didn't find them scary but they were way creepy. When I read pages that show the ghosts and their lot, I got goosebumps and the hairs on my nape were dancing up and down. But yeah, not scary at all. Just plain C-R-E-E-P-Y.

As I read through each story, I kinda got the feeling that those could happen to me at any given time, whether I was at home, at work or just walking around town. That thought made the whole manga-reading even creepier. Well they do happen to just about anyone, I guess. Good thing I never really sense anything beyond normal!

Fuan no Tane is a good read if you're into the supernatural stuff. Not as great as Junji Ito's works, but I guess I can't really compare it to that. They're under the same category but the whole atmosphere of the stories are different. Just don't read it at night (if you're anything like me, that is).