Forever haunted, a boy sits in a room. Alone. Telling tales of horror. One by one. Night by night. The shadows breed terror. Shall we begin?
One day, an elementary school child named Yuuma tries to jump out of his classroom window. His classmate Hina stops him and, in a bid to stall for time, asks him, “Do you know the round of a hundred ghost stories?” Hina tells Yuuma about a ritual where, if you tell a hundred ghost stories, you’ll see ghosts afterward. Learning this gives Yuuma a new lease on life. Chapter by chapter, he shares ghost stories with the reader, slowly but surely inching his way toward one hundred…
Now that we’re in the second volume, we can see why this kid is so committed to dying by ghost. His parents… are abusing him. It wasn’t obvious at first, but now you see it. The gradual reveal of his situation is the real horror.
The art style has a clean but sketchy look to it, and it echoes both the style of ONE and Masaaki Nakayama. An odd combination, I know, but it makes sense when you see the panel layout and the way that everything is drawn.
The framing and the short story format are perfectly in sync. I’m worried for this kid.
