Screentone Nightmares: God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand
God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand is a manga written and illustrated by Kazuo Umezu. It’s initial 1986 publication run began in Big Comic Spirits, a weekly seinen (manga targeted at young adult men) manga magazine that has a history with great horror manga having also published the original runs of Kengo Hanazawa’s I Am A Hero and Junji Ito’s renowned Uzumaki. The manga ran for seventy-seven chapters before being completed in 1988 and subsequently published in collected volumes. Umezu, one of the oldest mangaka still with us at 84, began his career while still in high school and is widely considered the forefather of horror in the medium. While some of his earlier works like Cat Eyed Boy and Drifting Classroom are perhaps more well known and certainly more influential, I decided to start this series of articles off with a dive into a work that was new to me and will hopefully be new to our readers as well.
God's Left Hand, Devil's Right Hand, translated from the Japanese Kami no Hidari-te Akuma no Migi-te, is an anthology of five interconnected stories all centered around Sou Yamanobe, a young school boy plagued by nightmares. And what nightmares they are. I was immediately in love with this manga’s opening scene of a girl sleeping as the blades of scissors suddenly erupt from her eyes. The only logical reaction to this violence without context is visceral disgust. Good job, I’m hooked. The art in these opening scenes won me over as well. This aged manga style, not nearly as refined or as homogeneous as some of the work we might see today, with subtle flourishes that conjure the work of pre-code western horror artists like Wally Wood or Joe Orlando and shadowy hatching that brings Edward Gorey’s Gothic storybooks to mind. Within a few panels we learn that this is actually one of Sou’s nightmares. He wakes to find the girl, his sister Izumi, sleeping peacefully in the next bed over. But things don’t stay peaceful for long. Izumi’s friends show up in the middle of the night to draw the kids out into a storm to watch the local river flood. Things step into the surreal here, and this is where the manga really cemented itself for me. The kids find a basement in the flooding river, washed in from...somewhere? It’s bizarre and dreamlike in its logic but that doesn’t stop the girls from forcing Sou down the basement stairs to explore. In the mud and debris of the basement he finds a pair of old rusted scissors, an artifact that launches the plot of this first story, aptly titled “Rusted Scissors”. From there, Sou’s life is turned upside down as he is haunted by ominous visions of a new teacher, Izumi is stricken with a terrifying illness, and a version of the Japanese Slit Mouth Woman legend comes into play.
There’s a lot to digest here as the plot gets more batshit with every page. The most visually interesting thing in this first story is Izumi’s illness. Things are, inexplicably, coming out of her body. Like, a lot of things that shouldn’t be there: rivers of mud, children’s toys, newspapers, entire skeletons. This imagery alone is worth the read. As the story climaxes we get a brief hint that bad dreams may not be the only peculiar thing about Sou and we also get a fairly satisfying ending with Sou escaping a maze-like, body-horror nightmare world by climbing out of his sister’s head. For real, this whole story is insane. Subsequent stories see our young hero Sou assisting in the murder of a teacher, burning a spider-woman alive, fighting serial killers, and engaging in full on spiritual warfare with inter-dimensional demons. Yeah, shit escalates.
I had a huge amount of fun reading this series and while most of the work didn’t have the mesmerizing effect of the first story, it all stayed consistent enough to keep me enthralled. Sometimes the horror is mundane and a little predictable. The hoards of eight-legged fiends in “Tongue of the Spider Queen” may make your skin crawl but it won’t make your stomach turn. What will make your stomach turn is watching a deranged father tear the clothes off his young daughter and throw her on a chopping board for butchering in “The Black Picture Book”. This series covers a lot of ground so even if it slows down in certain spots, stick with it and you’ll be pleased that you did. As a final sell check out the awesome gallery of my favorite selected images below.
Join Justin as he chats with actor Lisa Schrage about her vast book collection, Prom Night II, becoming Mary Lou Maloney, long lost film props, her first horror conventions, and more!