I used to be a huge fan of Junji Ito's work - I sang his praises constantly on Tumblr and recommended him to many of my friends. Now, I see the fault in my actions.
Jigokusei Remina - Hellstar Remina - is a work that feels ultimately pointless.
Hellstar fits quite nicely into the Junji Ito mold - the female heroine watches the world collapse around her, and nearly everyone in the story dies. The work is so full of violence and death that I nearly felt sick reading it - not because I can't stand violence or death (hell, one of my favorite movies is End of Evangelion) - but because everything in it feels pointless.
There is virtually no explanation for WHY the things in the story happen. They just happen, seemingly without any sort of reason. At least in Ito's other works - Uzumaki, for example - there is a REASON for what happens and the death that it entails. This reason is nowhere to be found in Hellstar. The planet Remina just comes and destroys everything for no reason. Millions, if not billions, of innocent people die for no reason. You watch them die - not only die, but struggle to live by doing everything they can, and then still die. The death in the story is dealt with so objectively that it is not fun to read. You feel nothing towards these people killed en masse; they are simply plot devices. Not only is it uncomfortable, but it is flat-out boring.
This kind of voyeurism can be enjoyable sometimes, sure, but in this work I found it totally off-putting and uncomfortable. Like I said, I felt that it was handled in a miserable way compared to usual Ito.
The main characters don't have enough time for real development - Remina stays the absolute same throughout the story, and every other twist can be seen from a mile away. The story feels so forced through these characters, your level of psychic distance from the fiction is astronomical.
The work is just boring, with its only redeeming qualities coming from Ito's art. The man has a real talent for drawing grotesque landscapes, may they be on Earth or on foreign locales, and his characters are expressive physically if not emotionally.
Pass on this and read Uzumaki instead, or some of his shorter-form collections. They have much more impact and depth than this misfire.
