I think the story about a group of twisted siblings trying to make contact with the spirits of their dead parents was pretty neat, but all of the other ones were quite forgettable in my opinion. His friend Teshima also spreads the rumor that Ryuusuke is the Intersection Bishounen, which causes him to be the target of obsession by nearly every girl in school. She told him that she is in love with a man and is pregnant with his child, but he's married and wants her to get an abortion.

The Rib Woman - A wonderful story that blended themes of body image with a wonderfully creepy narrative. As expected with Ito's work, a lot of stuff goes unexplained lmao, but for me it's the absurdity combined with the grotesque imagery that I find enjoyable. The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections.At the very least, Lovesickness is an original idea - I’ve never heard of hiding your face and asking strangers for fortunes - but it’s also a hella stupid one. of this are linked stories that centre around the custom of people with problems going to an intersection, accosting the first person that they meet and asking their fortune. Especially all the schoolgirl suicides - they all just happen to carry box cutters and they all decide to kill themselves within moments of the beautiful boy telling them a dumb fortune?

I can’t judge this collection off of that story alone, however, and the rest of this book (nearly half of all its content) made me feel worse about the collection overall.

Rumors begin to spread at school he is the Intersection Bishounen, which causes girls to flee to him in a madstruck state of love and boys to despise him. This story was unsettling, disturbing, and altogether really enjoyable, with an ending I didn't quite see coming. The last 50 pages include two shorter stories that I think are by far the best part of this collection [unfortunately, since they also take up the least page space]. The entire atmosphere of the main story is what really held me; it was eerie and unsettling in a very subtle way, with brief bursts of that in-your-face horror some people love. I suppose I’m happy to just have more of Ito’s work collected and translated, but it made a book that started so strongly end on a bad note.

She replies by saying that Ryuusuke has been acting strange around her and she's afraid that he doesn't like her anymore.The Mansion of Phantom Pain” was an all right standalone story with an interesting idea, but it wasn’t given enough time to grow, suffering a fate I imagine “Lovesickness” would have if it had been reduced to one chapter. Good Counterpart: The boy at the crossroads gets one in the form of Ryusuke, who becomes the boy in white, encouraging the suicidal to find purpose by helping others instead of driving the happy to suicide. The collection features the official English release of Lovesick Dead, originally released in Japan in 1997, as well as both of Ito's stories featuring the Hikizuri siblings, among others. Memories of Real Poop” was humorous and presumably autobiographical, but at just four pages long it was at best an amusing little epilogue. For example: A girl's hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head; Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other; a woman treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister's skin, etc.