Oninbo and the Bugs from Hell

The Naive Horror of Hideshi Hino

Oninbo and the Bugs from Hell. DH Publishing/Cocoro Books, Tokyo: 2004. 192 pp.  Originally published in 1987,

Bugs from Hell grow inside the human heart.  They feed on the bitter emotions that only humans make, and the young demon Oninbo finds them delicious.  Yes, it sounds a bit like Boogiepop Phantom, who eat similar coronary dwellers, but unlike her, Oninbo is completely indifferent to mankind.  He's just hungry.

So it is with the one of the latest titles from Tokyo publishing house, Cocoro Books, Oninbo and the Bugs from Hell, by the notorious manga-ka Hideshi Hino.   The author of more than 250 manga titles over a span of 30 years, a large portion of his works are finally appearing in the Western world.  After Blast Books acclaimed publication of Hell Baby and Panorama of Hell in the mid 90's, little was heard about this unusual manga-ka.  Now, DH Publishing has licensed more than 100 of this works and is planning to publish 9 titles this year alone.  

Hino's style is childish.  Amazon Book lists his books as young adult reading, but his work is grotesque with mass amounts of black blood, rotting flesh and hideous demons.  He excels at drawing hideous vermin, maggots, decaying corpses, worms and disgusting mutations, and in this book, he's at the top of his form.  His work seems to hideous for children, but many Japanese seem to discover him before the age of ten.  

Oninbo is a cute little boy demon, but unlike traditional Japanese demons who often befriend men, he is utterly indifferent to human suffering, except that he likes to feed on it.  Not only does he consume the bugs that grow in human hearts, but he has the weird trait of eating real bugs by popping out his eye and drawing them back into his eye socket.   Hino delights in strange gustatory habits.

Not only is he skilled at catching bugs, but he can sense the horror inside people's souls.  The story opens on a boy who has psychotic delusions.  He sees a soccer  ball as a flying human head, and the pool he swims in becomes alive with corpses trying to drag him down. Sensing a tasty bug, Oninbo shows up, shrinks himself so he can wander around inside the boy's body, sees some of the boys hideous memories and finds an especially delightful the bug from Hell embedded deep within him.  The boy feels better but his more knowledgeable parents warn him that Oninbo is a demon capable of casting people into Hell on a whim.

Oninbo wanders around looking for bugs inside a variety of characters.  The host of his next bug is young sailor-suited girl, Maki.  Even though she's a young girl, she's no idol.  Hino has no time for the eroticism that saturates so much of Japanese comics, even horror manga.  

Maki  has the typical Hino-esque delusions: seeing a cooking chicken and as baby's corpse and catsup as blood spewing from a hatchet-split head.   She has the spirit of an insane man as well as the usual bug from hell.  Oninbo dispatches the spirit who bears an odd ressemblance to the hero of Hino's Panorama of Hell, though almost makes Oninbo sick with his gross body.  Oninbo eats Maki's bug and she gets better.  Strangely, her father remarks that  was Oninbo the bug-eater who saved her.  

Next, Oninbo meets a lonely woman whose evil spirit tries to make her commit suicide.  After the usual frightful delusions, Oninbo saves her.  She asks him his name and thanks him but he is unmoved as he goes off singing about Hell's lake of burning blood.

So Oninbo is quite a character, cute but hard to understand his appeal.  Hino's manga has no eroticism, romance, super science, or dragons. The violence seems small time compared and the grotesque parts are indeed gross.  Underneath is insight into everyday human problems and a feeling of rage against the forces that sap the human spirit.  This is something a manga reader understand even before the age of ten.