Summary
The single-story focus helps “Tomb Town” evolve into one of the anthology’s richest tales.
This recap of the Netflix anime anthology Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre Season 1 Episode 7, “Tomb Town”, contains spoilers.
Junji Ito Maniac abandons the dual-story structure in its seventh episode to instead deliver a more comprehensive and focused adaptation of Street of Gravestones (or Gravetown) from The Circus Is Here. It’s a story about the literal manifestation of guilt, wrongdoing and self-serving attempts at covering such things up, with another clever overarching concept and some nasty-looking imagery.
Junji Ito Maniac Season 1 Episode 7 Recap
The main characters here are siblings, Tsuyoshi and Kaoru, and they’re traveling to stay with a friend named Izumi. On the way there, though, they fatally knock down a young girl, hide the body in the trunk of the car, and try to find a way to dispose of it without anyone finding out.
This proves impossible, though, since the town they’re staying in is littered with tombstones which we learn spring up wherever a person in the town dies. And it isn’t just people — even the animals get their own little headstones. Of course, not being able to move through a blockade of tombstones is a pretty obvious metaphor for refusing to deal with the weight of one’s actions, but the episode imagines this as a literal place and considers the story’s gimmick from a logistical standpoint.
We see, for instance, how the townsfolk try to navigate impending deaths in terms of available space. Wherever a person dies, that’s where their headstone pops up, and since the place is already littered with tombstones, there has to be some consideration for moving the dying before they expire. It’s grim because, in a way, you can totally see how it would happen.
The twist of the story is that the kill Tsuyoshi and Kaoru killed was Izumi’s younger sister, Ayumi, and her body remains in the trunk, presumably about to turn into a tombstone at any moment and expose the crime. If the body is interfered with, though, it leaves the corpse in a state of metamorphosis, and it has to be thrown down a specific well that was dug for this express purpose.
This is where Tsuyoshi and Kaoru try to dump Ayumi, leading to a spiraling series of events on the way to a very bleak ending. Here, the show benefits from giving a story room to breathe and develop, and it’s easy to wish more episodes were devoted to only a single story.
You can stream the Netflix anime anthology Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre Season 1 Episode 7, “Tomb Town” exclusively on Netflix.
Additional reading:
- Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre Season 1 Recap.
- Junji Ito Maniac Season 1 Episode 6 Recap.
- Junji Ito Maniac Season 1 Episode 8 Recap.
- Will there be a Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre Season 2?
