Eventually, unable to cope with her coy flirtation and their desire to possess Tomie completely, they are inevitably compelled to kill her — only to discover that, regardless of the method they chose to dispose of her body, her body will always regenerate. While Chizumi is an Obviously Evil Creepy Child, Yuuma looks like an entirely Ordinary High-School Student. According to the afterword (a short comic, itself), he is a reference to Sincere Apology(tm) culture, where some such-and-such does something bad and then makes a big public apology (Sincere Apologies do not need to be sincere, though they might be). In "Dissolving Classroom", Yuuma says that his parents were cruelly strict with him when he was young, and that he relieved the stress from this by killing small animals.

Red Oni, Blue Oni: Yuuma is meek, polite and Apologizes a Lot while Chizumi is rude, aggressive and openly hostile to everyone who speaks with her.

Chizumi and Yuuma are shown to have a strange relationship as they are both frequently mean to each other, but Yuuma will go out of his way to help Chizumi with what she wants. Offscreen Teleportation: Chizumi always seems to appear out of thin air when her victims least expect it, often to frighten them. In another interview, Junji Ito talks about his interest as rumors as part of spreading horror, [10] which can also be seen in Dissolving Classroom with Tomohito who is afraid due to the rumors about Yuuma and Chizumi that he has heard. Azawa began torturing animals as a way to cope with his abusive parents, and he killed a snake; after this, Chizumi's personality became warped, and he believes she's cursed by the snake. This latest collection features seven brand new short stories that perfectly showcase his insane/terrifying art and storytelling.

Detailing the depths at which a teen will go to get revenge on the world, DISSOLVING CLASSROOM is J-Horror at its most beautifully grotesque. Sometimes his weird is technoscientific ( Gyo), but more often it is a supernaturality arising from the apparently nonsupernatural, such as group violence ( Tomie) or the shape of a spiral ( Uzumaki); it is a weird rarely explained.I am a huge fan of Junji Ito’s graphic works so I have been reading through his entire translated collection this year. When one of his classmates gets too close to the pair, she quickly learns the true meaning of Yumma’s apologizing and why everyone he apologizes to disappears.

If we are to believe Chizumi, then all of his polite and meek behavior is merely an act to allow him to kill as many people as he possibly can, which firmly puts him here. Various children: Multiple children appear in "Children of the Earth" stuck in holes; however, they seem to be empty shells.Paper Tiger: In contrast to her brother, Chizumi is terrifying to look at and openly threatens to eat the brains of anyone that she talks to. Bait the Dog: Yuuma is a polite, handsome, well-behaved and earnest young man who apologizes to everyone he meets over the smallest things. I've resolved to read every Junji Ito manga, but I've realised that I've already read his best works, leaving only the more recent ones till anything fresh comes out.