In 2018, manga artist Shintaro Kago burst onto the comic scene with his English debut: Dementia 21 (reviewed here at Broken Frontier), a collection of absurdist short stories. Reminiscent of the master of horror Junji Ito, readers became fascinated by Kago’s unique style, black humour, and penchant for the horrific. Flash forward to 2025, and Kago has made his triumphant return with Brain Damage published by Fantagraphics, another collection of short stories sure to haunt readers for a long time to come.
The cover artwork of Brain Damage is visually very striking, and gives readers a glimpse at the weirdness that will lie within: a close up of a girl, one half of her face normal and unremarkable, but expressionless. The other is peeled back to reveal what at first looks like a machination of automaton parts, and on a closer glance, appears to be a horrific pile on of cars colliding, with injured and dead bodies spread across bumpers. Both the author’s name, and the title, are written in English as well as Japanese. Similar in form to Dementia 21, Brain Damage collects four brand new manga stories, each gorier and more macabre than the last.
The first of the four stories, named ‘Labyrinth Quartet’, focuses on four inexplicably identical women, who find themselves trapped in an eerie building. At first very distrusting of each other, considering wild theories like cloning experiments, they soon realise they can’t actually remember pivotal details from their lives before they found themselves in the building. Deciding to work together, they begin to navigate the labyrinthian building where all of the walls look the same (with some brilliant use of texture and shading by Kago). When the first room they enter contains four dismembered female bodies, again, nearly identical to themselves, they realise the real danger they are in, particularly when a knife wielding psychopath in a mask gives chase. But for what reason are they all gathered there in there first place? You won’t see the twist for this one coming, and Kago keeps readers on the very edge of their seats throughout. Trigger warnings for gore and mild nudity, which are recurring themes throughout.
The three other stories in the collection are equally as shocking. In ‘Curse Room’, a young woman begins to fear that she is cursed, when oddities begin appearing in her apartment; hair in the shower that does not belong to her, emails with grainy pictures of graveyards and personalised messages on her television. But this story doesn’t belong to her…. In ‘Family Portrait’, people in a small town start to mysteriously disappear. At the root of it all? One senile and super creepy old man. Particular trigger warnings for explicit, grotesque sexual content towards the end of this one. In ‘Blood Harvest’, a killer strikes again, when yet another mangled body is found in an otherwise pristine car, making people question whether cars really are just the machines they appear to be…
Kago’s kinetic line work throughout is wonderfully expressive, and fits perfectly with his engrossing storytelling style. The enhanced expressions, and the almost clinical focus on bodily horror (such as slashed innards) is so rooted in realism that it’s shocking. The panels are always exacting, with nothing and no one ever breaking through, making the macabre fates of the characters confined to the neat boxes all the more horrifying. The lettering was clean and precise, with a more traditionally ‘comicky’ font being utilised for onomatopoeic sound effects, such as the ‘bam bam bam’ on a locked door. It’s slightly unsettling how emotionally detached and normal the lettering seems from the horror being illustrated.
Brain Damage is shocking, surreal, engrossing and deeply repulsive – often all at once. It’s not a book to dip into lightly (and certainly not one to read over lunch), but for readers with the stomach for Kago’s particular brand of meticulously rendered depravity, it’s a masterclass in controlled chaos. This is horror that dissects as much as it disgusts, and if you can endure its more extreme moments, it’s an unforgettable return from one of manga’s most provocatively inventive voices.
Shintaro Kago (W/A) • Fantagraphics Books, $29.99
Review by Lydia Turner
