Boku Mushi

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Nishioka Kyoudai are a manga duo, probably most know for Kami no kodomo, and this is a selection of their earliest work. It looks and feels the same as any of their future work: simple child-like artwork, but with an outsider charm and an eye for composition and interesting patterns. These works are dark, surreal, and gruesome, but the chosen art style might make the disturbing content a bit more palatable.

It's a mixture of poetic, quasi-poetic, nihilistic, sad-sack, existential fragments. Sometimes with more or less of those descriptors. You'll see many of the same motifs repeating. Searching for something to make the narrator "complete," ... but usually looking in all of the wrong places. For example, umm... the womb. Yeah... it's one of those kinds of compilations of stories with obvious symbolism about wombs, and crawling into them, and pulling stuff out of them that shouldn't be there—and butterflies on the walls, and creepy ball-jointed dolls.

Probably half of the characters are borderline or actual sociopaths/psychopaths or serial killers—or are isolated, disconnected, live a meaningless existence, etc. I'm highly curious as to whether it is a common IRL "trope" for serial killers to actually dig through their victim in hopes of finding something special—it's definitely a thing in the work of Nishioka Kyoudai, though. There are plenty of dismembered corpses in explicit detail, but the art is too childlike for it to be especially disturbing, and it even somehow takes on a more poetic quality—however laughable it may feel to write that. The characters so often look like corpses with their soulless eyes, so who can be shocked at seeing a corpse in this upside-down world?

There is some meaning to be found, though I wouldn't say all of the stories are terribly deep or compelling, but it's worth it for the art alone, if you're keen on the style. The art direction is excellent, with striking patterns and textures, an array of cute and disturbing knickknacks that provide oodles of contrast.

Sometimes it's amazing how they can go from being terribly cryptic to as blunt as possible: a man with a woman who chirps like a bird, who is only good for the ol' "in-and-out," and not knowing what to do with her, he finds a birdcage to stuff her away in to hopefully abate her squawking, then she flies away. Bahahaha.

These are probably best taken as eerie dream excerpts—on occasion, nightmarish, and other times merely dreamy—spun with a little bit of poetic gloss and self-loathing. Or if a surrealist painter were making picture books for children that no sane parent would want their children reading. The two Night shorts are probably my favorites for how undiluted they are in dreaminess.