Abstract:
This thesis consists of a close reading of mangaka Junji Ito’s short story Haunted Wood Mansion, utilizing classic and contemporary understandings of the projection of the human body onto architectural domestic space to connect the monstrous transformations that occur to the house to the transformations of the relationships between father, daughter, absent mother, and step-mother. Emphasis will be put on how meaning is constructed through the unique comic form, as well as through the work’s connection to familial and sexual trauma as it exists in literary canon and other forms of media. To conduct this analysis, I will traverse the work in a mostly temporarily linear manner, documenting each major transformation that occurs in a chapter by chapter format. The first chapter will focus primarily upon the unaltered house in relation to a spatial and temporal historical context, and the role that its inhabitants play in maintaining the house's relation to that context. The second chapter focuses on the advent of change brought by the introduction of a stranger into the home, and the ways in which personal boundaries and authorities are tested, bent, and warped. The third chapter investigates the culmination of those warpings, and the ways in which the architecture of the house aids and abets the growing levels of disconnect between each inhabitant, while the fourth lingers on its climax, and on the way in which the language of the comic exaggerates and bends to meet the culmination of these familial and sexual disconnects.