Fuan no Tane

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Fuan no Tane is a unique entry into the horror genre. The manga is comprised of a series of vignettes featuring regular people coming into contact with the paranormal. All of the stories are extremely short, some comprising of no more than two pages. The books are divided into small sections with a cluster of stories relating to a central theme. A few examples include invasion, being followed, and shadows spied from the corner of your eye.

I’ll be direct in saying that this collection, initially, seemed lackluster to me. While many of the concepts are very good it felt like the execution could have been ... better. As I was reading I kept thinking that this brand of jump scare horror is held back by the medium particularly in the first volume. Many of the stories ended the same way and it got to be incredibly repetitive. I think that the eerie chills presented in this manga would have been better suited to either film or a video game, something that would give it motion.

Nakayama’s art style is quite clean, and instead of gore readers are presented with a distortion of what’s normal. I wouldn’t consider the things in the stories to be scary per say, but it’s more just the idea of them, the uncanny valley. Things that take human shapes but clearly don’t know what a human looks like, so instead you get a mockery of one. This style of artwork can be extremely hit or miss, with some of the things looking cartoonish and ridiculous, breaking the tension built by the story.

As I read, I felt pretty neutral the entire time. There was the occasional story that had a really great panel that unsettled me, but overall I was pretty meh about things. I didn’t realize the effect of the manga until much later, when I found myself standing in my kitchen during the small hours of the night, the unease that settled over me when I was surrounded by the dark. It was then that the intended effect of this manga hit me. For a week I felt just a little more skittish walking alone in the dark, so in a way the manga was successful.

The horror in this series is subtle, and on it’s surface it doesn’t seem all that scary. It is an atmospheric collection that doesn’t leave you feeling shocked or horrified, but instead instills a sense of dread that isn’t easy to shake off. Fuan no Tane roughly translates to Seeds of Anxiety and it is a perfect explanation of the stories. Each story is a snippet that comes quickly and leaves you with an ellipses, planting that small seedling of worry as to what would have happened next. The dreadful feeling of catching the attention of something that you really don’t want.

It is also very easy to see the way that Nakayama develops his premise over the course of the three volumes with each volume getting progressively better than the one before. Story pacing improves, more variety between the stories, and sometimes the occasional “after” panel that shows a person’s reaction. Some of these were actually funny and helped to ease the tension. It is an exploration into a different kind of horror, one that doesn’t rely on extreme gore to incite a visceral reaction from readers. Instead, Fuan no Tane presents an interesting sort of horror that plays on paranoia, on a fear of the dark and the unknown. While this hasn’t been a scare fest I can appreciate the way that this manga was crafted.

I heard this was one of the scariest manga out there, which was the reason why I was drawn to it.

I read this whole thing in one sitting, not because I loved it....but because some of the stories were so short.
Short as in some were a single page and the longer ones had little to no dialogue.

The first story drew me in and I was looking forward to a collection of scary stories, come to realize the good ones were pretty outnumbered by the ones were basically nothing happened.

The art work was pretty good so some of the scary moments creeped me out.
Though the ... art didn't make up for the basically empty chapters.

If you're looking for scares, you're hardly going to find them in this manga.

Get ready for cocktease the manga... So, the reason I'm giving this a 4 instead of a 3 is that I genuinely really like some of the artwork and ghost/monster designs. The reason why I take such an issue with the story is first off, a collection of short stories in a manga CAN work. It's harder to make that work with just 2-5 pages per story, but it's still possible. This is not it. There's 0 tension building, just shock and not even that exciting of shock either.

It's safe to say that practically every short story within this collection follows a formula. That formula ... goes "here's your setting and characters, which you'll know nothing about", "scary face or dead-all-along or Immaignorethebigbad", "end". There's few variation. There was one surprisingly wholesome short about a brother who used what seemed to be a harmless cursed bear to share the beauty of the outside world with his sister who couldn't go outside. I know the bear being "cursed" probably was meant to be creepy, but it didn't seem that way and was funny enough, the only short I felt had enough room to breathe.

Almost every other story feels like if it were given some time to immerse you and didn't just end abruptly that there'd be some genuinely interesting tales. Instead, we get the punchline and the height of the action but nothing else. This might have been intentional to constantly show you the "peak" while never coming down (thus lending another reason behind the name "Seeds of Anxiety"), but here, it doesn't work. It just makes you feel like you're missing larger chunks of the story, like fast forwarding a movie to only the best bits but ignoring all else.

All in all, I'd say that if you were just collecting some spooky manga panels, this might have some of what you're looking for. Don't come looking for some good 5-10 second stories or else you'll probably be disappointed