Kohei Horikoshi, the creator of the best-selling manga My Hero Academia, is back with a new story. Quit Laughing, Shijima is a one-shot manga published in the latest issue of Weekly Shonen Jump. Advertised as a horror story, Horikoshi’s latest work is a fun supernatural adventure featuring your stock teenage protagonists and some creepy creatures, but fails to live up to the high bar of the greatest manga horror.
Since My Hero Academia ended two years ago, “unemployed Horikoshi” has become sort of a meme among the fandom. Freed from the grueling weekly manga drawing routine, the author graced fans with a string of incredible illustrations showcasing his artistic prowess. However, Horikoshi hasn’t been idle. He teased his desire to work on a horror manga back in 2022, and now fans can see the results.
Quit Laughing, Shijima is set in Konoshiro City, a bustling Japanese seaside town (described as “largeish” with a population of three million, which cracked me up). Azumi is a boy nearing the end of his second year of high school who likes to live one day at a time without worrying about the future. He’s secretly in love with Shijima, a bubbly girl with a loud laugh that everyone in town seems to fawn over. Azumi also has a secret: he can see grotesque humanoid figures populating the bay. One day, one of these monsters appears on dry land, seemingly following Shijima. The following day, she stops going to school.
While not particularly original, this premise is enticing. Horikoshi’s character work is brilliant as usual, and the design of the monsters is a major hook, striking for both originality and creepiness. Unfortunately, the story immediately steps onto well-trodden ground. If you have watched Wicker Man, Midsommar, or Higurashi: When They Cry, you know where this is going.
Shijima has been chosen as the sacrifice to a godlike being that inhabits the bay and grants prosperity to the town. A select few families are aware of this brutal tradition and keep it alive. Shijima is apparently happy because this is a great honor, and it has led everyone in town to treat her as special. When Azumi finds out, he rushes to her aid and kills the monster while declaring his love.
There is nothing wrong with tropes — they are the foundation on which every story is built — but Quit Laughing, Shijima plays awkwardly with the genre it is meant to represent. Outside of the “human sacrifice” premise and the look of the monsters, there is little that can be described as “horror” here.
Japanese urban horror has a strong tradition that spans different media. From Uzumaki to Silent Hill f to The Summer Hikaru Died, these stories all have something in common. They take familiar, comforting settings and turn them into twisted reflections where horror slowly seeps in through the cracks. This brand of Japanese horror always has a psychological tone; it turns the ordinary into the extraordinary by exposing the unsettling reality lying beneath the crust of the mundane, like peeling a bandage to reveal a festering wound.
A great example is A Questionnaire on the Mouth, a short manga by Sesuji and Suzo Oshimi, recently published on Shonen Jump Plus. It starts as an interview with a group of friends and turns into a tale of dark secrets and psychological abuse tinged with body horror. It’s eerie, unsettling, and it carefully builds up tension: all qualities that Quit Laughing, Shijima lacks.
Perhaps it’s unfair to compare Horikoshi to masters of the genre such as Junji Ito or Shuzo Oshimi. After spending 10 years writing and drawing a superhero action story, switching to a completely different atmosphere and storytelling style must be no easy task, even for someone as gifted as Horikoshi.
The issue with Quit Laughing, Shijima is that it shouldn’t be read as a horror story, regardless of what the author says. It’s the pilot for a supernatural action series, and the ending actually works quite well in that regard, making readers believe the announcement of a full manga could come soon. The characters are fun and relatable, and the scene where the protagonists take out the monster together, while declaring their love, gave me My Hero Academia vibes. Emotional storytelling is what Horikoshi does best, and he doesn’t need a full series to show it.
One element of the one-shot’s story resonates more than the rest. Readers are introduced to Shijima as the most popular girl in school. Later, in a flashback, they learn that when Azumi first met her, she was being bullied for her “weird” teeth. Gradually, it’s revealed that the only reason Shijima is so popular is that she’s been chosen to be the sacrifice. She’s being psychologically tortured into accepting her role as a victim by the entire town, including her family. It’s a brutal twist, and it reminded me how the best Japanese horror stories can blend the mundane and the supernatural, using the latter as a lens to interpret the most twisted aspects of the former.
However, this element doesn’t emerge as the core of the story. By the end of the one-shot, Azumi stands on a rooftop in a pose that mirrors Deku from My Hero Academia, having become a sort of supernatural vigilante whose mission is to end horrible traditions like the one Shijima was subjected to. It might not be true manga horror, but I’m still excited to find out what happens next.
