During a pivotal scene in horror manga artist Junji Ito’s latest book, No Longer Human, the protagonist/antihero Ōba Yōzō is invited to a Marxist group meeting in 1950s-era Tokyo. Yōzō isn’t really a joiner type, and he contemptuously imagines the activists morphing into a cluster of giant cockroaches with twitching antennae and black glistening eyes. If this was a typical Ito tale, this scene might end with the narrator slowly backing away from the bugs, his mouth gaping in madness and terror. But in Yōzō’s twisted worldview, human society is the nightmare; the insects, instead, are a soothing balm. “It put me at ease,” he reflects, “because the most dreadful thing in the world for me was human beings.”