Alley: Junji Ito Story Collection Manga Review – Review

By now, Junji Ito‘s name is so ubiquitous not just in manga but in horror overall that it almost feels pointless to explain who he is. The four-time Eisner Award winner has created iconic horror manga after iconic horror manga. His latest work to get an English release is a collection of self-contained short stories called Alley. To be more specific, the book itself is called Alley, and one of the short stories in the book has the same title, but there are nine other short stories in this book. All of them are one chapter long.

The titular story is about a room overlooking an alley where a new tenant can sometimes hear children. Others follow a home that gets hastily turned into an inn whose hot spring attracts some weird customers, a father who will never give his daughter’s boyfriend his approval to marry her, a house that gets overtaken by mold and whose caretakers are nowhere to be found, and a town with no roads and no privacy.

As individual stories, broadly speaking, the stories of Alley are exactly what you’d expect from Ito: spooky and quintessentially unnerving. While I wouldn’t rank any of them among Ito’s all-time best works (to be fair, that’s a high bar), they’re still enjoyable. Plus, because there are so many works in this book, we see him flex a huge variety of genre muscles from psychological to body horror, which is brought to life through his expressive and creepy art style. My favorite stories in this compilation were Alley and Mold, while Smoker’s Club and Town of No Roads were easily the weakest of the lot.

None of the stories in this book are among Ito’s most well-known (but, again: high bar), and being so short, almost none of them (Town of No Roads being the exception; while it’s not to say its story is complicated, it’s the one that requires considerably more set up than the others) feature any particularly complicated stories. But I think that works to their benefit. One of Ito’s trademarks is how unsettling he’s able to make ideas that sound simple (sometimes because they are simple) on paper, and the stories of Alley are no different in this regard. He’s usually able to do this through his trademark art style. However, something must be said about how his demonstrable skill in composition and creating a certain ambiance helps. In any case, this is all a long-winded way of saying that it’s the simplicity of these stories and concepts present in most of the stories of Alley combined with Ito’s, well, Ito-isms, that helps to give these bite-sized (Halloween-sized, if you will) stories an extra punch.

However, Alley feels somewhat disjointed as a collection. Many times, one is tempted to think that the book’s theme (if there is one) is enclosed spaces—hospitals and houses, for example. And indeed, that is the case for most of the stories in this collection. But then stories like Descent, Blessing, Smoker’s Club, and Memory are peppered throughout, where this potential theme doesn’t apply. I guess you could try to argue that each of the prior stories is about enclosed spaces in the heart or mind—and to be fair, I guess that could apply to Blessing and perhaps to a lesser extent Memory. But that feels like a stretch for Descent and Smoker’s Club. However, as it stands for me, this lack of a clear throughline makes this collection feel fragmented.

I realize that a lack of substantial connective tissue won’t matter to every reader—in fact, I can easily imagine how some readers might like this about Alley. However, having a certain level of curation and cohesion makes a collection of short stories feel all the stronger, especially when they’re all by the same creator. It helps to affirm that, yes, these stories, while all self-contained, still belong together, and it can significantly enrich the reading experience. Alley does achieve this at times, but it feels like just as quickly as it enters that zone, it leaves it.

Looking at Alley as a whole relative to Ito’s other works and compilations, Alley is one of the less striking ones. While several individual stories in here are sure to keep you up at night, as a collection, it’s also sure to keep you up at night—wondering what, aside from their authorship, connects, say, Mold to Smoker’s Club. Even so, there is still strength in releasing all these stories in the same collection. It allows the reader to experience several different kinds of horror all in one convenient book—it’s a horror sample platter of sorts. And even if some items on the plate don’t necessarily feel like they go with the others, they’re still delicious and sure to leave you hungry for more.