[The following essay contains MAJOR SPOILERS; YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!]
At first glance, the premise of Junji Ito’s “Smashed” is almost comically absurd. The plot revolves around a group of youths that become hooked on a sweet, syrupy substance that an acquaintance smuggled back to Japan following a recent excursion to the jungles of South America. Unfortunately, every time they partake of the nectar, they risk a brutal demise: abruptly crushed flat by some invisible telekinetic force, reduced to grotesque pancakes of blood, hair, bones, teeth, and leathery flesh. Escaping this grim (and darkly humorous) fate should be a simple enough matter—just quit eating the darn stuff! Alas, any other food or liquid that they attempt to ingest is utterly revolting (or so they insist), tasting of ash and dirt. Thus, they continue to greedily, gluttonously consume their newfound ambrosia, repeatedly gambling on immediate short-term gratification—a sucker bet that inevitably leads to disaster. Not even the more sympathetic characters are immune to karmic retribution (indeed, the most amoral among them survives the longest); all succumb to their base urges—and pay dearly for their transgressions.
Ultimately, it’s a rather silly story. Ito himself admits that the development process wasn’t terribly complex; what if, he essentially wondered, humans were akin to the humble mosquito—voraciously seeking nourishment, in constant peril of being swatted into oblivion. Nevertheless, the tale’s deeper implications lingered in my memory, haunting me. Were the protagonists literally deprived of their agency by paranormal means? Or was their fatal addiction comparatively mundane in nature, indistinguishable from the sort of chemical dependency one might encounter in our own reality? Did a malevolent otherworldly entity manipulate their actions? Or were they doomed by some self-destructive impulse engraved directly into mankind's collective unconscious—a counterintuitive yet irrepressible instinct as inherent and immutable as the need to breathe?
This theme of compulsion recurs throughout Ito’s work (e.g., “Used Record”, “Hair”, “The Enigma of Amigara Fault”), and the ambiguity surrounding it is consistently compelling. The author wisely resists the temptation to provide concrete answers; the true horror, after all, lies in that very uncertainty.
Comments