The Most Disturbing Story I've Read in Years

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There's no other manga quite like Homunculus, by Hideo Yamamoto. And, considering how life-changingly disturbing it is, maybe that's for the best?

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▬▬▬▬ Tale Foundry Team ▬▬▬▬
• Talebot — The Talent
• The Taleoids — The Talent's Helpers
• Benjamin Cook — Writer, Director, & Voice Actor
• Kathyrn Healy — Researcher & Writer

[crushingon]

I think one of the most effective, but cruel ways for a writer to convince the readers that a character is a manipulator is to successfully manipulate the audience into rooting for them.

[greenhydra]

Your regularly scheduled reminder that protagonist does NOT mean hero.

[firestorm]

The shift of Nakoshi from someone you root for at the beginning to the monster we see later is a perfect example of how most monsters are in the real world. They seem like perfectly normal, even likable people, until they don’t. On a more personal note, as someone who has struggled with mental health, I’m quite familiar with people trying to “help” you to feed their own narcissism.

[dylanclark]

Projection. It’s about projection. And about how we have to address our own shadow or else inflict it on reality.

[tristanfarmer]

Not everyone is a good person. The point of view of a terrible person won't always make sense. They usually think they are justified.

[cristian-vladutcurca]

For me is fairly obvious that the protagonist never had an actual power of seeing someone's soul or insecurity, but as a narcissist he mastered his manipulation and non-verbal language recognition for years so that he could peel apart facades. That's why, in my opinion, he saw men with diverse struggles and women with struggles only related to their sexuality given his awful history. Opinions?

[InsomniaticVampire]

The homunculus were never really portrayals of his victims but his own twisted way of viewing them

[jacobwooten]

He makes me think of people that call themselves empaths, the ones that seem to have an addiction to fix everyone around them, but never face their own issues

[babungo]

In the intro, before you even said what manga you had read, I was thinking to myself "he probably read a gore-filled psychological horror manga. Surely he wouldn't be talking about-" and then you said "homunculus" and my heart stopped.

[SurrealKeenan]

I've read this story and I wonder if the point was that he didn't get any supernatural ability. What if he was already observant and just lost a connection between his subconscious and his conscious. When he sees a person, he projects what he assumes to be their insecurities onto them. He sees the short man and assumes that he must have a height complex. He sees a boring guy and assumes he must be a shallow, 2 dimensional person. He sees random women and, being subconsciously sexist, focuses on their sexuality

[Majik-]

I’ve read so many disturbing manga and still I get a really bad pain in my stomach when I read them

[Lady_Chalk]

Oh I never finished reading that one. I think the "homunculus" that the doctor who performed the surgery on the main character was the most interesting. Also, I was certain that the main character actually had a lot of money, he was just tired of living that life.

[fie]

"Now every homonculous he sees looks exactly like him " that gave me goosebumps

[LoganKearsley]

Trepanation was actually a life-saving procedure in many cases for relieving pressure on the brain after cranial injuries.

[Sarah]

I think if this story really had been about some guy who went around "fixing" people's traumas somehow, it'd make this story very shallow and disappointing. Trauma isn't something a random encounter with some dude can "fix, " and only someone at the height of arrogance, narcissism, presumptuousness, and lack of empathy could believe themselves capable of "fixing" other people, as this manga clearly shows.

[littledreamerrem]

If you haven't already, check out The Summer Hikaru Died. Really interesting premise and eerie art,

Without going too deep, it's about a boy, Yoshiki, whose friend Hikaru went missing on a mountain. Whatever came back may look, talk, and act like Hikaru, but Hikaru's gone. "Hikaru" lives in his place, and there's no changing that. Whatever feelings Yoshiki has for the real Hikaru, he has to come to terms with the fact that he isn't coming back. And then there's the extent to which "Hikaru" will go to protect Yoshiki...

Update: An anime adaption has been announced!

[Ballinout]

I think the writer wanted you to know these people exist in the world and not be oblivious to it. Sometimes trying to avoid these realities and pretend the don't exist makes us weaker and easier targets for such individuals.

[antagonisticalex]

REALLY recommend PTSD Radio! Its on par with Junji Ito and Homunculus imo. Although it is unique in its own right.

[pancakes]

In a very strange way this reminds me of that weird show "Xavier Renegade Angel", where the main character is a Narcissist who constantly hallucinates and builds up his own importance, going around and "Fixing" peoples problems that they didn't ask him to fix, and almost always leaving the world a worse place than when he found it.

[Talisguy]

I haven't read the manga, but going by what I've seen in your video:

Nakoshi wants to help people to fill the hole in himself. He doesn't know who he is, he lacks a coherent sense of identity of his own, so he makes other people's trauma his identity. Essentially, _he_ decided that the visual hallucinations he's experiencing are representations of people's inner trauma, and not just...y'know. Hallucinations from brain damage sustained in the surgery. He took a phenomenon that had several different possible interpretations, including an obvious one that doesn't require the existence of the paranormal but is both boring and a bit of a bummer to think about, and he picked the one that made him The Main Character. His changing reflection shows this: each person he has "saved" becomes a part of his personality to fill the complete emptiness he feels inside. In addition to the possibility that he's just hallucinating and occasionally making lucky guesses about people's childhood traumas, he's very likely projecting his own feelings onto people to form their homunculi (the girl with the vibrating pelvis and the girl with the locked pelvis seem to imply that he's quick to label one a slut and the other "frigid, " for instance.)

Also...this might be a reach, but a protagonist still being considered a "hero" by the story after doing some pretty despicable things is not uncommon in fiction. His a self-image as a hero and a saviour that he's building because there's nothing else to him - or at least, nothing else that he wants to acknowledge - wouldn't necessarily be shaken by some of the horrible things he does. I won't name specific examples, but I'm sure most people can think of a work of fiction, particularly an older work of fiction, where the "hero" does something horrifying and it's just brushed aside because the author doesn't see it as a problem.