Last summer, an unusual scene took place in front of the municipal literature museum of Setagaya in Tokyo: [there was] a long queue of young people for the exposition. They were waiting to see the work of Junji Ito, an emblematic figure of Japanese horror manga.

Ito began his career in the 1980s with his famous work Tomie,i about an immortal vampiric femme fatale, who unfailingly seduces men and women alike. She is often murdered by crazy and jealous suitors. Sometimes, her mutilated body, asunder and scattered in different places, recomposes itself as if having a super-powered capacity for cellular self-reorganization.

Her feminine semblances are present under a different name each time in almost all of Ito's works. Ito's style does not conform to the grammar of the horror genre. His works evoke as much fear and anxiety in the reader as they do the sensation of an excessive non-sense (as is the case in dreams).

In Billions Alone,ii at the onset, we see two naked corpses that were found in a small river: bodies of both sexes interlaced and sutured at various points with a fishing net… The scene changes: A young woman comes to knock on the door of our hero, a hikikomori – a young man who has withdrawn from social life. They know each other because they went to the same primary school. Now, 15 years later, she has become a beauty. Moreover, she is plainly trying to seduce him.

All of a sudden, we see two fighter jets (also seen at the end) dropping leaflets: [it is] propaganda urging young people to meet and form couples, because no one wants to get married or have children in this country. Under the injunction of the One of love, our young man decides to go and see the young woman, who had come to visit him.

On the road, he discovers these people who are interlaced and sutured by [net] threads. When our hero arrives at the young seductress' house, she is in the middle of sewing her parents together, in order to make them "be together" with the help of her needle.

Faced with the apparent aging of the population, a number of conservative Japanese politicians demonstrate their violent natalism, according to which a man and a woman will love and desire each other "naturally" once they are put "together". Ito's works allow us to see the other side of this horrific biopolitics.