Manga Review: Cat-Eyed Boy The Perfect Edition 2 by Kazuo Umezz
Quick recap: The Cat-Eyed Boy (who has no “real” name) is the child of nekomata cat monsters who for unknown reasons was born looking unusually humanoid. His mother died in childbirth and his father dumped him at a shrine. Fortunately, the baby was taken care of by a local human woman until the village was destroyed. Now the boy wanders Japan, encountering monsters and other bizarre supernatural incidents.
This second volume has the back half of “The Band of One Hundred Monsters” arc. This band of monstrous-looking individuals with strange powers was explained to Cat-Eyed Boy as being mutants, humans shunned for their deformed appearances. Their leader, Kodomo, offered the Cat-Eyed Boy a place in their ranks as they sought to take revenge on society by mutilating the normal-looking but evil. Cat-Eyed Boy refused on the grounds that despite his humanoid appearance, he’s a “true” monster.
So far the Band has attacked a manga artist and a corrupt politician, and are now engaged in taking down an entire wealthy and exceedingly greedy family. They’ve managed to reanimate the corpse of the family’s patriarch as part of the plan. The youngest son of the family is actually a pretty decent kid, so Cat-Eyed Boy is trying to save him.
Naturally, the Band of One Hundred Monsters isn’t going to make this an easy task. Kodomo tips its hand by going after the “good” boy first on the grounds that he will surely grow up to be as evil as his relatives. This sets off a series of reveals about the true nature of the Band and Kodomo. Cat-Eyed Boy stops the menace in the end, but it’s left a little ambiguous.
“The Meatball Monster” concerns a supposed family curse. The Sakuragi family have a legend that one of their ancestors encountered something horrible in the mountains, describable only as a “meatball monster.” He died raving soon after. Ever since, every few decades one of the Sakuragi bloodline sees the monster and dies.
None of this, of course, would ordinarily be Cat-Eyed Boy’s problem. Except that he’s now arrived in Gojo City and sees the Meatball Monster himself. Figuring out why, and surviving the experience, becomes his new goal.
The monster has also shown itself to several members of the current Sakuragi generation, who are desperately trying to avoid its curse, going so far as to blind themselves. (That doesn’t work, the Meetball Monster can still force you to see it.) The one unaffected Sakuragi, a medical doctor, is trying to work out just what the curse really is.
There’s some mumbo-jumbo about how the Meatball Monster is allegorical for the fear of cancer, but that doesn’t help much as somehow the sheer terror of the Sakuragi family has allowed the Meatball Monster to manifest in the physical world and it is multiplying rapidly. The Cat-Eyed Boy is able to overcome it, but at the cost of one of his few possessions.
“The Thousand-Handed Demon” has Cat-Eyed Boy stumble across a village where the local multi-armed statue of Kwannon is apparently granting prayers on a much more regular basis than usual. Except that soon after getting their wishes, they die horribly, their blood gone. Turns out that the local priestess has been using various tricks to grant the prayers, then sacrificing the worshippers’ blood to the statue to grant it life. This backfires on her–seriously, anything brought to life by human blood sacrifices isn’t going to be benevolent. Or grateful.
Then we skip ahead to some stories from 1976.
“The Stairs” has Cat-Eyed Boy being proactive for a change. A little boy is missing his dead mother. The Cat-Eyed Boy happens to know about an abandoned house nearby with a staircase that allows you to see people in the afterlife. But you must only ever look once. The little boy can’t quite understand the word “once.” Cat-Eyed Boy regrets being proactive.
“The Promise” has a new father promise his son to a snake if it will let a frog go. Some years later, the snake turns up for its meal. Cat-Eyed Boy tries to intervene, but the parents are stupid, and the snake isn’t.
“The Hand” is about a little boy who has visions of Buddhist Hell. He believes that his mother will die unless he keeps his fist closed, anchoring her in the living world. But perhaps he’s mistaken?
“The Friend” is a spooky tale about two boys who are friends, but after one joins the soccer club, he becomes much more popular and the other friend feels neglected. The angry boy pushes his friend into a cave, and keeps mum as everyone else is concerned about the disappearance. Then he moves away with his family. The Cat-Eyed Boy tracks him down to ask for the location of the body, but there’s a twist that calls into question just how much of the story is real.
And that’s all the Cat-Eyed Boy stories there are, as the creator moved on to other ideas.
Cat-Eyed Boy is a solid character concept for a horror anthology series, someone who has good reasons for always being on the road, and morally ambiguous enough to have flexibility in the role he plays in events. And the monster art is great. But I can see how the creator was running out of stories that needed the character, most of the 1970s run is the kind of stories where the title character is almost unnecessary to the plot and just there for the brand name recognition. Nothing else quite reaches the same heights as the Band of One Hundred Monsters.
Content note: Violent death, including children and animals. Suicide. Body horror. Body fluid humor (Cat-Eyed Boy likes peeing on things to express contempt.) Horror fans from about fourth grade up should be able to handle this, but some sensitive kids may not be ready.
This is one of those quirky series that’s more memorable than great. Some of those images will be sticking with me for a while. Recommended to horror fans, particularly fans of monster design.
