Thoughts on Japanese horror comic book writer Junji Ito's story The Enigma of Amigara Fault.
A panel from the story. Check out the full version in dubbed format here.
In The Enigma of Amigara Fault, a seismic event opens a seam in an ancient mountain. Embedded in the fault line are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of human silhouettes. Inexplicably, people viewing the event on the news recognize their own outlines in these silhouettes, and they travel from great distances to view these mesmerizing openings in person. Some enter the mountain through these serendipitously shaped keyholes only to discover that the further in they go, the more contorted they must make themselves to continue on. In the end, those who succumb to the strange allure of the Fault are trapped deep inside the mountain, unable to move forward or backward; they have twisted themselves beyond all recognition.
A while after reading the story for the first time, I learned to wonder: Were the outlines ever there at all? What did those who entered the mountain see and hear when they answered the Fault's call? What did all the others who weren't chosen experience?
Ask anyone destined to become an addict about their first experience with their substance of choice and they will tell you that -- far from feeling weird, or out of it, or out of control, or embarrassed by their actions, or a hundred other reasonable responses -- they felt an overwhelming sense of rightness, of home. Addiction beckons with the lie of chemical completion, which, chased far enough, distorts the soul beyond all recognition, until the only thing that remains is the desire for the drug - the human addict a complex organism turned into a simple vehicle for the propagation of the chemical through space and time (much as viruses can commandeer the nervous systems of much more complex organisms to replicate themselves). The future becomes a blind pouch; we cannot look back to remember the past.
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