Junji Ito - Scarecrows: A grief not overcome

 

Hello my dears. I am the Raven who speaks to you.

In this video, I'll meditate on the short story called “Scarecrows”, written and drawn by the legendary mangaka Junji Ito. As usual, a recurrent and notorious feature of Ito-sensei, “Scarecrows” will present a supernatural story, with elements of the absurd, but which the author manages to insert into the factual world from the connection that the strange things he imagines are linked to typically human themes.

It is not my intention summarize or tell the story for you. The best appreciation is without a doubt reading and contemplating the graphical representation presented in the manga. But I rescue some elements of the narrative so that they can serve as an introduction for listeners to better understand my interest in discussing grief in this short podcast.

“Scarecrows” tells the story of two tragedies. One of them refers to Yuki’s suicide, committed after her father denied her the right to marry the man she loved. The father, day after day, visits her tomb in the cemetery and carries a huge guilt for Yuki's death. The boyfriend also makes frequent visits, but he encounters resistance from her father who mistreats and humiliates him, trying to prevent his approach to the tomb. Even with his daughter's death, the father apparently hasn't learned much. He even blames the boy for her death, outsourcing his responsibility and placing it on the lad.

The cemetery where Yuki was buried is next to a plantation, where naturally there are scarecrows whose function is to scare away crows and other birds that might want to approach. In an act of rage, Yuki's father pulls one of them off and sticks it on top of her tomb, in order to kick out the boy who shared a love with her, telling him that he was doing this because the scarecrow would shoo him like it did with the crows in the field.

Time passes and they leave. But the scarecrow still prostrate before the tomb. Upon returning the next day, the father notices that the figure, already frightening by nature, has begun to show traits of his daughter. It grew hair like hers. Day after day, the scarecrow reveals more characteristics of Yuki, never actually turning into a person, but gaining an appearance so similar that people who pass by the place come to believe that someone had made a scarecrow of Yuki, putting it in front of her tomb.

Emotional, the father forces the scarecrow to talk to him, but nothing happens. The only thing the scarecrow does is take on her features, making small eye movements and a pseudo facial expression. The father tries to take it home, but outside the tomb it goes back to normal, its original form. There is something about the environment, about the tomb, that transforms the scarecrow.

When the community becomes aware of the events, a predictable collective phenomenon occurs: everyone starts to make their scarecrows to stick in front of the tombs, hoping that they will take the form of their loved ones who are gone. The cemetery is no longer just a cluster of tombstones, but macabre scarecrows as well, dozens of them, all bearing human expressions.

From this brief preamble, I believe it is possible to reflect on this manga by Junji Ito. First of all, it's pretty clear to me that the element of grief is very strong. Saying goodbye to someone dear is not an easy thing, on the contrary: it is a very difficult process, which can take days, weeks or even months for the acute pain to gradually subside. This is definitely an element here. Yuki’s father frequent visits, motivated by pain and guilt, do not just fulfill a ritualistic function, one of respect: the visits to Yuki's grave have become the meaning of his life. Although the young woman passed away and made a split with earthly existence, the father's connection with her is still intense and permeated by a lot of suffering.

Some cultures, but not all, believe and encourage the good experience of grief. Funeral rites are performed not only because of the need to bury the dead, but also to say goodbye. As some people who share this belief often say, it's time to "let people go, their spirits migrate." There are many who believe that intense pain, the incessant desire to have a loved one back, the inability to move away from objects or mortal remains, or even the behavior of making the loss the center and sole reason for their existence, would be something that makes this transition process difficult. In other words, it would make it difficult for those who can no longer be here to actually leave. When scarecrows start to take on human features, that's something that comes to mind. The inability to overcome grief, the constant desire to reunite those who were lost is something that, somehow, keeps traces of them in this world. And, in this case, they ended up being reflected in the scarecrows, which served as modeling material.

Interestingly, Ito-sensei doesn't stop there. He will also work, in the manga, with the dimension of the trauma of death on the part of those who have died. In other words, those who died did not necessarily come out of this event unscathed. They may have been traumatically affected as well. Could the desire to find again those we lost be reciprocal? Could those who left nurture the desire to reunite? Furthermore, could those who died of unnatural causes be aware of this? Could they share human traits and feelings? And from that have individual motivations? Ito-sensei's manga is capable of let these question in the air.

But without a doubt the collective phenomenon caused by Yuki's scarecrow transformation is the most emblematic. It does point to dozens of poorly experienced grief, of several goodbyes that were not completely fulfilled. Of a dependency and lack never supplied. From a living and pulsating illusion that it would be possible to reconnect with loved ones. When people start to put their scarecrows in the cemetery, mothers taking children to meet the grandparents they never met and, at the same time, we readers see dozens of scarecrows with human features, but without the real ability to respond, to relate to each other, we are invaded by a gigantic feeling of malaise and even sadness. We reflect on the human condition, the fragility of our spirits. At the same time that we feel sorry for those poor people, perhaps this feeling is also transferred to our own reality. Is the blindness and hallucination caused by the pain and the inability to overcome, something that is only in the other people? What could also be dwelling in us, being reanimated, while we read and follow the story?

There is not a single answer to this question. Each one will respond according to their own experience with grief, loss and the way they deal with their own pain. “Scarecrows” is a manga that will affect people in different ways. And that might not even affect if the grief was done well or if the reader avoid to feel because of the fear that old pains and memories, repressed internally, might emerge.

Junji Ito has the ability to represent utopian things, which have no place in this world, in a way that is never safe. And this is what makes him so special, because while the elements are part of a utopia we are safe, they are merely part of a fiction and cannot touch us. But through its symbols and Ito's ability to make the unreal capable of invoking human themes, its creatures and oddities begin to be felt in the epidermis. They affect our minds, hearts and souls. It is when the utopian mixes with the real and, momentarily, enters the real world. The feeling of security is no longer a guarantee. And that's where the genuine horror comes from.

Corvid greetings!