Hauntress, the Manga

She looks a lot like Sadako, had the ghostly figure of The Ring matured into her early twenties. She acts that way too. If she rings your doorbell, do not answer. Unfortunately, Hiroshi makes exactly that mistake in Minetaro Mochizuki’s Hauntress, a fan-favorite horror manga that just had its English-translation debut.

She is unusually tall and her hair largely masks her face. Any horror fan can tell she is really bad news, but Hiroshi opens his door anyway. Supposedly, she was looking for his next-door neighbor, Yamamoto (whom he suspiciously hasn’t seen for quite a while), but she is making such a racket, he pops his head out to complain.

Ill-advisedly, he lets her in to use his phone. Conveniently, she leaves her bag behind as an excuse to constantly call Hiroshi on campus. Pretty soon, she ramps back up to full stalker mood, but with her focus shifted from Yamamoto to Hiroshi. He makes some incredibly bad decisions in the way he tries to handle her. As her threatening behavior escalates, Hiroshi calls his friend Satake for back-up and moral support. Something about her reminds his friend of the girl they once bullied in elementary school.

Hauntress absolutely look and reads like a vintage J-horror movie. Mochizuki is not super-concerned with character development, at least not in Hauntress, but he creates a seriously unsettling vibe. Combining stalker anxiety with the suspected supernatural, it definitely has the stuff to get under your skin. Mochizuki’s art is also starkly eerie (even if some of the action sequences are somewhat confusing to follow).

Although Hauntress has yet to be adapted for the screen, it is easy to speculate how it might have influenced dozens of Japanese horror films genre fans know and love. Frankly it is hard to fathom why it took so long for an English translation. This would have been a perfect property to license in the late-1990s and early-2000’s, when a lot of Americans were discovering J-horror movies like The Ring and The Grudge. If you enjoy those films, you will dig Hauntress too (of course, the converse is also true). Easily recommended for horror manga readers, Hauntress is now on-sale at book and comic retailers.