Hallowe'en's just around the corner, so it's time for some horror, innit?So, to this end, I'll be posting a few stories from a short Junji Ito anthology called Mimi no Kaidan, or Mimi's Ghost Stories. Mimi's Ghost Stories is an interesting collection, based on the book Shin Mimi Bukuro by Kihara Hirokatsu and Nakayama Ichiro, a collection of supposedly true stories of the supernatural collected from all around Japan. The title references a similar earlier work, simply titled Mimi Bukuro (literally 'Bag of Ears'). They gave Ito permission to change things up, to make the stories work better for the manga. To this end, he altered the pacing of certain stories, gave resolutions to stories originally simply left hanging...and introduced an incredibly unlucky protagonist by the name of Mimi, a somewhat excitable young woman, who ended up getting tangled up in all of these originally unrelated stories. Introduction out of the way, let's start with the first chapter...We open with Mimi talking about her apartment, which is in an old, not terribly well maintained building, with paper thin walls. This latter point bugs her a lot, as her upstairs neighbour is a noisy SOB...See what I mean about her being excitable? On the other hand, dude's kind of rude...(I love the second panel on the next page...Mimi's phrasing is so freakin' weird. I don't know if that's a translation artefact, or actually the way she was written in the original, however.)Spooky chick. And rude.Ito doesn't draw the most varied faces out there, but he sure does expressions well. Mimi in that second-to-last panel is perfect.So, some time passes, and one day she comes home, to find the upstairs neighbour cowering against the side of the building...Nervous little SOB, inne? I mean, sure, the chick's spooky, and OMG tall, but still, dude...In any case, the last straw for him comes that night, and he splits the next day. Mimi asks to be allowed to move into the apartment he vacated, hoping it'll be quieter - and is allowed.So, she's moving in, and decides to hurry out finish cleaning up her old apartment while her boyfriend and another friend finish up in the new apartment...and collides with one of the women in black, knocking her groceries out of her hands...DUN DUN DUN!What next? Well, I'm at page limits, so you'll have to read to find out. Too bad...you don't get to meet Naoto, Mimi's boyfriend, just yet.But, I shan't leave you with nothing else, no no!See, Mimi's Ghost Stories isn't the only adaptation of Shin Mimi Bukuro. Nono! There's also a TV series (made of short 5 minute episodes) called Kaidan Shin Mimi Bukuro, which adapt a large number of the stories. I'm not sure how faithful to the original book the TV series is, but if it takes liberties, they're different liberties than Ito takes. So...here's the TV version of this story...Selected episodes of the TV series are available in English as Tales of Terror From Tokyo - a terrible name since a lot of them don't even try to try to be scary.10 pages out of 30.