Manga Pick: Land of the Sacred Spirits

Land of the Sacred Spirits is a short manga by Jiro Matsumoto (松本次郎). It was published in his collection Keep On Vibrating (ゆれつづける).

Jiro Matsumoto is known for violent (and often pornographic) depictions in his works, although his works are usually very thoughtful and philosophical. And this short manga is no different.

In this story, a very common crime is entangled with mysterious and creepy things. A man kills his wife in order to marry another woman. This happens almost everyday, but what happens next in this story does not happen often.

The story’s theme is “the ultimate revenge of the innocent wife who was killed by her husband”. It seems to share the theme of the very popular Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, where a killed wife avenges herself by appearing to her husband in a variety of places. Those appearances seemed to be hallucinations by the husband rather than actual physical appearances. They were psychological means to harm the husband’s state of mind and direct him to his demise.

Jiro Matsumoto adds this ‘hallucinatory’ background but in a modern industrialized form. The area around Tokyo is getting filled with illegal landfills with wastes producing toxic gases. No more is said about that, but Matsumoto of course wanted to imply that what the husband is experiencing is a result of hallucination caused by inhalation of those toxic gases.

What the husband experiences is this: he kills his wife, carry her over to those landfills, and throw her corpse down there. He returns home, cheering to himself, to find his wife in the house and alive. He gets mad and kills her again, carry her over to the landfills, and throw her down. To his surprise, he looks down and finds that there are two corpses of his wife. He returns home, and the same thing is repeated, filling the landfill with hundreds of his wife’s corpses.

In the end, he gets really mad, and violently bring his wife to the landfill to show her how many corpses of her lie down among the wastes. He wants an explanation.

But the husband does not know that his own demise is waiting for him there. Falling on the ground, and weeping aloud that his wife ruined his marriage plane, he gets a hit on the head by a heavy block. His wife kills him.

The most astounding surprise can be seen in the snapshot below:

The wife throws him down onto hundreds of corpses of his own body!

So was the wife hallucinating as well? or was he killing himself all that time? or is it just a moral lesson to the husband?

You can read this great manga by downloading Keep On Vibrating. It’s the third story in this collection. Thanks to Kotonoha for translating this manga and offering it for free.

WARNING
I stress on that there are extreme violent and pornographic images in this manga. There are lots of blood and insults. So you must be over 18 (or 21 in some countries) if you want to read this manga. You must also be open to such violent depictions because there are a lot of them. Otherwise, they may be disturbing to you.

Direct download
Torrent download
Jiro Matsumoto’s homepage
Kotonoha