“Quick, become a mushroom… join me in the soil!”
When Silvia Moreno-Garcia and I co-edited Fungi all the way back in 2012, we put together a list of fungal fiction in various media, from William Hope Hodgson’s germinal 1907 story “The Voice in the Night” through one of my favorite films, 1963’s Matango, and far beyond.
One thing that we didn’t include, despite our best efforts at casting our fungal nets far and wide, was Shirakawa Marina’s 1976 manga UFO Mushroom Invasion. The reason for this rather shocking omission is simple: we had never heard of it. In fact, I had still never heard of it until this year, when translator Ryan Holmberg made it the sophomore installment of his line of Smudge manga translations from Living the Line Books.
The knee-jerk response, when one encounters something like this that is so inextricably within one’s wheelhouse, is to wonder how it is even possible to have been unaware of it for so long, despite the fact that it has existed since before I was born. A better reaction, however, is to be happy for both its conspicuous absence and its late discovery, which serve as a reminder that, no matter how much perfect shit you find in the world, there will always be more waiting.
Did I just suggest that UFO Mushroom Invsasion is perfect? I certainly did. And while it may not be perfect in some other senses, it is absolutely perfect for me. The influence of Matango is as inescapable here, especially in some of the manga’s climactic panels, as the influence of horror manga legend Kazuo Umezu – two great tastes that taste great together.
Despite those two obvious points of inflection, however, this is still very much its own thing. The lengthy asides in which Shirakawa stops to explain how mushrooms work or to retell various mushroom-related legends from China and Japan are what really make UFO Mushroom Invasion stand out from the crowd of other horror manga I have read – a crowd that is, to be fair, far from exhaustive.
While I was an old hand at fungal fears, it was horror author Jonathan Raab who introduced me to the concept of “high strange,” a term (so far as I can tell) originally coined by astronomer and ufologist J. Allen Hynek in 1970 to describe ufological phenomena.
Like any other subgenre of horror, high strange fiction doesn’t have a universally agreed-upon definition, but it certainly isn’t necessarily limited to stories about UFOs. For those who are unfamiliar with the idea of the high strange, I’d point you toward some recent movies, including 2019’s The Vast of Night or just about anything by directing duo Benson & Moorhead. That’ll give you an idea.
While UFO Mushroom Invasion combines fungal, ecological, and apocalyptic horror, it also samples heavily from the high strange. “Some people are simply possessed by UFOs,” writes Udagawa Takeo (author of Manga Zombie) in an appreciation of Shirakawa Marina included in the back of the book.
Shirakawa certainly seems to be one of those people. As the back matter points out, this was only one of three manga the creator did around UFOs. More to the point, however, Shirakawa’s affection for the subject – and, specifically, for the more high strange manifestations of it – is apparent throughout the work, from the early introduction to UFO history to the way speculation about UFOs is treated by characters throughout the manga. Indeed, some of the best pages in UFO Mushroom Invasion involve characters wondering about aliens, and the artist noodling with what they might look like.
The overall result is a book that is a must-read for fans of fungal horror or high strange weirdness, a manga that has been a completely unknown blind spot in my life that is now wonderfully filled in. Besides the appreciation from Udagawa Takeo, the back of the book also includes a brief overview of some of Shirakawa’s other works and I hope that the Smudge line of manga translations is a huge success because I want to read all of them.
