Fushigi-chou Sanban-chi

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What a dreadful excuse of a manga this one was. I know that 99/100 horror anthology manga are bad and all but why do they all have to be THIS horrendously awful?

There are 18 stories told over the course of two volumes in this manga, you'd expect at least a couple would be okay, but no, they're all pretty terrible. The only story I thought was mildly entertaining was a joke one that was 4 pages long, the rest were mind numbingly stupid and pointless. The stories all have simple premises but they're all done more or less the same way and very rarely does ... anything exciting or unexpected ever happen in them.

The general theme of each story is that they all have to do with death and or the afterlife. Though sometimes the stories have absolutely no correlation with the theme the manga is supposed to have and they just have random crap happen because why not. The general gist of every story is that a random joe comes across a supernatural thinger-ma-jig and then they either escape, die, or absolutely nothing happens and the chapter ends. Too often it's the latter which is boring and meaningless.

All the individual stories in this manga range from a noble 4 pages to a frightening 80 pages, where the most frightening thing is how much time you waste while reading this manga. All the stories are dull, which makes the longer ones all the more tedious to read through when very little happens over the course of any chapter.

This manga also has some nasty shit in it, like in one story a priests' life purpose is to jack off cats and a robber drinks a jug of the cat semen the priest was saving and is granted immortality, this man is then raped by a giant cat and then beheaded but he still lives as he is immortal. The moral of this story is immortality is bad as it's just eternal suffering. Now please tell me why this story had to involve jerking off cats and a cat raping someone? I think it was supposed to be comedic, but it was more revolting than funny.

When this manga isn't trying to teach you life lessons with it's very unimaginative ghost stories they try and have a few laughs to lighten the mood! It's all dark comedy but just like the stories, the jokes are also excruciating. The comedy and drama elements in this manga don't exactly blend well very much. The jokes are mainly just laughing as misfortunate people, I'm all for some morbid humor, but I don't exactly find some poor sap getting raped very amusing.

The character designs in this manga are fine enough, they're all supposed to be demented looking which sometimes looks nice along with the more realistic backgrounds and background characters. This is the only thing I can find that I'd honestly praise about this manga. With that said though, a lot of the time the characters have pretty much the exact same design as one from a previous story which is lazy. With the unique artstyle I can't imagine they couldn't think of more than one dorky male adult design.

Also, the only reason this manga is called "3, Street of Mysteries" is because in the first story in the anthology, the main character lived in house three on the street of mysteries. It had absolutely nothing to do with the story and the one time it's mentioned, a cab driver makes a bad joke about it and then they move on. I just thought that was an interesting factoid.

In a months time I will probably have forgotten every single story in this anthology, none of them stick with you and they're all extremely uninteresting. I wouldn't recommend this manga to anybody.