Brain Damage

by | Jul 31, 2025

Horror manga, like most horror subgenres, is a surprisingly deep and disturbing rabbit hole. A reader might read Junji Ito’s Uzumaki or Ishida Sui’s Tokyo Ghoul series and then discover multiple authors, along with those authors’ twisted imaginations, who populate this genre. Indeed, one particular joy for a horror-loving librarian is being able to recommend a terrifying book based on the readers’ interests. For those librarians with patrons who are fans of manga and horror, they can suggest the stories lying in wait in Shintaro Kago’s collection Brain Damage.

Kago is no stranger to disturbing readers, having penned works like Dementia 21, and the four stories here, propelled by Shintaro Kago’s singular vision, will burrow their way through the readers’ skin and into their brains. Follow four identical women wake up in a strange room and try to discover why someone’s hunting them. Meet a woman who devotes her life to helping the living dead move on. See a family fights to be remembered to keep from literally disappearing from existence. Discover how used cars carry the deaths of their owners with them.

While this book doesn’t have a wraparound story that ties all these tales together, the stories individually stand on their own and savagely shock readers by way of brutal twists.Those familiar with horror manga from creators like Ito and Sui should find familiar ground as reality unspools around these characters like cheaply woven thread. But in this realm, Kago’s satirical stories and pitch black humor raise societal, ethical, and existential questions, whether it’s questioning the ethical care reserved for flesheaters or the moral quandaries involved in stopping a horde of hungry automobiles. In this way, Kago’s fiction hearkens back to anthology pioneers like Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone, who revealed real-world issues to readers through the lens of the fantastic.

Fans of manga might be familiar with how many books use black and white images to tell their stories, which can seem an odd choice for a graphic novel, particularly among horror graphic novel fans used to seeing red ink all over the page. However, Kago’s decision to use black and white should not be viewed as restraint or self-censorship. This book does indeed have bodies being turned inside out and twisted in all sorts of directions (with black ink substituting for blood). Some of the more disturbing images in this book require no blood; there’s something disconcerting about seeing a hole with no ragged edges or blood spurting simply appearing in a person’s head or torso.

Brain Damage could serve, for many readers of horror graphic novels, as a bridge between manga and story collections and vice versa. For librarians in charge of adult collections looking for content to satiate your gorehounds and manga fans, this book could offer another author for your patrons to digest after they have devoured all of Ito and other manga horror authors in your collection.

Brain Damage
By Shintaro Kago
Fantagraphics, 2025
ISBN: 9798875000935

NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+)
Creator Representation:  Japanese,
Character Representation: Japanese,