PTSD Radio 1 (Vol. 1-2): Omnibus (PTSD Radio 2-in-1)

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Like Junji Ito’s Uzumaki, PTSD Radio takes something everyday and weaves it into a series of chilling, cryptic, twisted, repellant, and alluring manga stories that become more than what they first seem.

Room Full of Crazy: One of the weird boy's victims obsessively writes invitations to the God of Hair into the walls and floors of his room. Oct 28 NBA Star Rui Hachimura Gets Animated and Possibly Saves the World in New Crayon Shin-chan Episode Protagonist Journey to Villain: It's shown that in the distant past, the God of Hair was a benevolent force that helped villagers as long as its rituals were properly observed. However, its power was badly abused by several prominent people to kill off their rivals and have a largely innocent but compulsively loyal woman pay for the crime. Having its main totem smashed likely didn't help either.

NAKAYAMA: When I was a kid, my uncle on my father's side got me and a bunch of my cousins together at my grandma's house to tell scary stories, and that's where my interest started. As a matter of fact, though, I'm quite the scaredy-cat! I can't bring myself to watch horror movies or TV horror series. I won't go into haunted houses, and I'm too scared by other horror manga to read anything but my own work! Maybe it's because I'm so readily scared that I'm so full of frightening ideas—it might be exactly what enables me to create these stories. Traumatic Haircut: Done to a young girl in a rural village, though apparently as some kind of ritualistic safety precaution by her family, to stop the "god of hair" from taking it, and threatened towards a strange transfer student by a gang of bullies. Later on, there are indicia that it's a very old tradition, that has something to do with the ultimate source of whatever's happening. Some people might find the fact that the stories start to follow a certain pattern as a con, making them feel predictable. Of course, it's up for everyone to decide whether that kind of format is entertaining for them or not. As for me, in the vast majority of them it wasn't a problem at all. However, for the sake of this review, I felt it was worth of mentioning this aspect. Demonic Dummy: A straw dummy that might be possessed by the God of Hair (or might be one of its forms) appears.

PTSD Radio has story and art by Masaaki Nakayama, with English translation by Adam Hirsch and lettering by Pekka Luhtala. Kodansha Comics released the first volume digitally in 2017 and will release its first and second volume as physical omnibus version for the first time on October 18. PTSD Radio” หรือชื่อไทย “วิทยุหลังความตาย” ผลงานมังงะสุดขนลุกจากปลายปากกาของ “มาซากิ นากายามะ” ซึ่งขึ้นชื่อเรื่องความหลอนจนเหมือนกับเรื่องที่เกิดขึ้นจริง เพราะเรื่องราวในมังงะชุดนี้ ได้แรงบันดาลใจมาจากประสบการณ์จริงของผู้แต่งนั่นเอง โดยตีพิมพ์ครั้งแรกในปี 2010 และหยุดการอัปเดตไปเมื่อปี 2018 NAKAYAMA: Hmm… I'm no exorcist, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think if you run into a being like that, the best thing to do is not to take it too seriously. Most of them are just figments of your imagination. Most of them…probably… NAKAYAMA: I'm very much interested in folk traditions and the beliefs of Japan's minorities, including mountain worship, as well as Buddhism, Shinto, and the like, but Ogushi-sama wasn't based on any specific real-world belief system.

Surreal Horror: Horrible things happen to people for no discernible reason they can understand... the problem is, those horrors often turn out to have their own logic, which doesn't mesh with human understanding. Enter Masaaki Nakayama. Nakayama is no newcomer to horror comics, but his work was previously unavailable to English readers. He started his career in 1990 after his entry "Ridatsu" won the runner-up prize in a contest by Kodansha's Afternoon manga magazine in 1988. Another story, "SHUTTERED ROOM," took second place in the 20th annual Tetsuya Chiba Award's general category. He didn't focus solely on horror comics, but his apt eye for short, startling tales came to the forefront with his 2002 manga Fuan no Tane ( Seeds of Anxiety). The series, featuring an unsettling face with sideways features, inspired a live-action film by Paranormal Activity 2: Tokyo Night's Toshikazu Nagae starring Anna Ishibana and Kenta Suga. NAKAYAMA: I hadn't heard the expression “jump scare” [an English expression that has no perfect Japanese equivalent] before. You're right that surprising or frightening the audience is a major element of this kind of work, but sheer terror isn't the only thing I'm going for. I think the biggest thing is to shake readers emotionally, but only ever so slightly. That slight disturbance grows within each reader in its own unique way; that's what's important. What that seed grows into—the direction it takes, how widely it spreads, how deep it goes, how deep it is, its color and smell—are outside of my control, and that's the real key to transmitting a creative work. Explosive Breeder: The Body Horror things multiply copiously inside human bodies, and exit in a rush via any available orifices.

What's It About? There exists an entity lurking in the shadows. It will grasp victims by their hair and pull them down, down to their death. You can see it out of the corner of your eye, its grasping hands from the streets below or shadows cast on the street. It's unknown whether its a god, a curse, or a psychosis. For the most part, there is no real resolution or narrative rigidity; typically the protagonists will remark, either in narration or in dialogue, on a figure evident only to them, and the story will conclude on the revelation or the assertion of this phenomenon as real, stopping right before any explicit confrontation to make it clear that there is no real chance for them, no playing field even resembling level. Ogushi can't be accurately described as an active organizing or orchestrating force; the deity may serve as a starting point or a framework, but author Masaaki Nakayama's tendency is to treat it as almost extra-narrative: to be remarked on, but perpetually out of reach. What was the genesis of this project, the initial vision? Did you always plan to embed a larger mythos within the story? Cursed Item: A table, from which a ghost inexplicably emerges at night. When it is turned over to a monastery for inspection, the head priest immediately has it incinerated, and shows the owners several nails that had been imbedded in the wood. As he explains, it's likely the wood came from a tree used for ushi no toki mairi, turning it into a source of impurity and corruption. Anime Senpai ได้ลงบทความเปิดเผยสาเหตุที่ PTSD Radio ไม่ได้เขียนต่อนั้น มาจากเรื่องน่ากลัวที่เกิดขึ้นจากตัวนักเขียนเองPrehensile Hair: Hair and its manipulation is a recurring element of the ghosts in the stories, based on the long-forgotten rituals related to the worship of the God of Hair. ITP / Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura) ที่ร่างกายประตุ้นภูมิคุ้มกันจนไปทำลายเกล็ดเลือด นั่นจึงเป็นสาเหตุที่ทำให้ “PTSD Radio” ต้องหยุดการอัปเดตแบบไม่มีกำหนด โดยในมังงะตอนสุดท้ายก่อนที่จะหยุดไป ก็ได้มีการอธิบายเรื่องราวที่คุยกับหมอลงไปด้วย Creepy Doll: One story involves a group of kids finding a large sealed doll covered in hair... and whatever was bound to it is furious at being exorcized. Faces that are preternaturally symmetrical, like on a mannequin, are also unsettling. I couldn't give you a reason, but it's something that reaches very deep. By the same token, if you take an image that's stable and balanced and upset that balance even slightly, that can be creepy. Try it and see. You know Hello Kitty, right? Her face is basically a mirror image, left and right. Take one of her eyes, just one of them, and make it 0.1 mm larger. It suddenly looks very weird. NAKAYAMA: No, not to speak of. My feeling is that if someone encountering one of those apparitions was able to give it a name, it would suggest they had the mental or psychological bandwidth left to do so – but I don't think they do, or would. I simply speak on behalf of the characters, so I don't know anything they don't know.