Hebi-onna

To appropriately celebrate Umezu Kazuo fifty years of career, Shôgakkan undertook in 2005 the great project of a complete collection of his works, gathered under the title “Umezz Perfection !”. Hailed as the “ultimate version of horror as viewed by Umezu, the creator of Japanese Horror”, the collection is currently composed of thirteen volumes : Hebi-Onna, Negai, Mushi-tachi no Ie, Orochi (four volumes), Kyôfu (two volumes), Neko-me Kôzô (two volumes) and Chô ! Makoto-chan (two volumes) — a selection based on the impact of each work rather than a chronological approach.^[1]
Published in Kôdansha‘s Shôjo Friend magazine, Hebi-onna is indeed the author’s first major success, and stands as the starting point of his horrific reputation. Published in a girls magazine, the story is naturally almost entirely feminine, written in three parts : “Mama ga kowai”, “Madara no Shôjo” and “Hebi-shôjo” (respectively “Mommy is scary”, “The speckled girl” and “The snake-girl”). While the first two parts share the same main character in the little Yumiko, in addition to the eponymous snake-woman, the third one’s role in the overall story will however take a little longer to stand out, but completes and logically concludes this collection.

Of course, all the basic narrative techniques from horror stories can be found here : the game of anticipation and expectation, as the moment of revelation is delayed for as long as possible ; the grown-ups stepping down from their role, at worst disbelieving, at best useless or absent ; or the inevitable situations where the main character finds herself trapped with no hope of escape.
But first and foremost, the theme of transformation, be it moral or physical, remains at the center of Umezu Kazuo’s concerns — with the recurring fascination for the monster inside, which sometimes reveals itself. Incidentally, Negai and Mushi-tachi no Ie allow to further discover the whole range of the maestro’s palette — a rich and diverse talent, more interested in a “psychological horror” and exploring the dark corners of the human soul than resorting to gore (though he will not refrain from doing so, should the opportunity arise). Thus the works of Edogawa Rampô, another master of Japanese fantastic, can here spring to mind.
The horrific side of Hebi-onna may well take precedence, but Umezu Kazuo takes malicious pleasure in letting it play out in the intimate and private domain. With children (ideal preys, innocent and powerless on the world they live in) as main characters, he chooses to let the monster arise in the usually protective and nourishing mother figure — which then becomes predatory and carnivorous. This theme comes back to haunt his works again and again, especially in the story Hebi (from the Negai collection), which almost identically reproduces the structure of this first “Mama ga kowai”.^[2]

Carefully crafted and particularly effective, Hebi-onna also displays surprisingly modern art, for a piece published more than forty years ago. Unlike the style Umezu Kazuo will later use (darker, but also more realist), the art here is simple and light, the slightly stiff poses being transcended by his sense of paneling and composition. Of course the choice of reprinting in a larger format (B5) must be thanked, despite a few rare pages suffering from a bit blotched inking/printing,^[3] for allowing to rediscover his style, unlike the bunkô format in which most of his works could be found in libraries.
If the suggestive power of this story is still very potent, its age nevertheless shows through the portrayed period — a post-war Japan where kimono is still often worn, where the countryside still exists, a domain of small villages and of fireside stories told by a wizened old woman, still able to remember the Meiji era. Stories which are — inevitably — scary.