It’s not every day when you hear a mangaka quit his manga to stay alive. You wonder what a piece of fiction can do to a writer who is using his imagination to write. But when you read everything that happened to the mangaka before he was ‘forced’ to quit the manga, you might understand why he had to stop writing this manga.
The horror stories in this manga took inspiration from the real-life experiences of the mangaka.
“PTSD Radio” is a horror manga that Maasaki Nakayama started. It started publishing on 7 July 2010 and to this day has published six volumes available physically as three omnibus edition copies, with each copy having two volumes. Only the first omnibus volume is available now, and the other two volumes will be released on 17 January and 9 May 2023.
PTSD Radio was updated the last time in 2018. The publisher of this manga is Kodansha Comics. Other famous works of this mangaka include Fuan no Tane (Seeds of Anxiety) and Fuan no Tane +.
What makes this manga special?
“PTSD Radio” has a collection of different horror short stories throughout the manga; some even intertwine at some point. Each chapter of this manga is named after a specific radio frequency which reappearance as another chapter to continue where the story left off.
The story progression of this manga goes so smoothly that most people fail to comprehend how eerie these stories are. Just like the manga series of Junji Ito, the art style of this manga follows body horror and creepy character designs of ghosts. It shows us horror from every object present in our daily life and sometimes leads us to radio devices with human expressions on them.
What did the author quit writing?
A few years before this manga started serialization, the mangaka rented a workplace where he could work on his future projects. He also hired a team to work on this manga, as all mangakas hire assistants to complete chapters quickly. The incidents that followed this decision made him quit writing.
The landlord of this workplace was an older man. One day, the mangaka got into a misunderstanding with him regarding the rent. At that moment, the landlord made a twisted face in anger, which the mangaka took inspiration from and drew in his manga.
The first thing the mangaka, Masaaki Nakayama and his team discovered about his new place, was that there was a broken shrine nearby. Shrines are sacred places where people come to worship. Masaaki find a broken shrine quite unusual.
The mangaka didn’t pay much attention to this as he was too busy catching deadlines for his manga series. Later, the whole team, alongside the author, faced incidents like scratching around the ceiling of their new place, the smell of raw sewage from the building, and the lights switching off unexpectedly.
Also Read: Top 12 Horror Manga To Read
Things escalated when some team members started to witness shadows inside the building. After this, some of the staff quit, and some fell ill. But when the mangaka shifted places, he suddenly fell ill, and explained his whole situation at the end of his manga with illustrations:
Black, Gelatinous Blood Blisters formed all over my lips, tongue and gums and wouldn’t stop bleeding.
On top of that, my body was dicovered in hematomas (clotted blood spots) and I started seeing blood in my urine and stool.
I knew this was no joke, so, I got checked out at the hospital and…
Maasaki Nakayama sharing his grave situation while drawing this manga
He further explained his conversation with the doctor in the manga:
Doctor: Nakayam-san, please admit yourself to the hospital immediately!
Nakayama (the mangaka): Huh?
Doctor: You’re going to die at this rate. Nakayama-san, currently,… Your body has virtually no platelets!
Conversation between the mangaka and doctor
The disease that the Masaaki had developed was Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura (ITP), a condition in which platelets decrease abnormally in the body and blood clotting stops, leading to unexpected bleeding internally and externally. The mangaka drew a similar situation to his disease in this manga, in which a person vomited blood, and demons emerged from this vomit.
After diagnosing the previous disease, the mangaka developed a new disease: one side of his face swelled up like a balloon, and his body temperature dropped, which Masaaki also mentioned in his manga. After this, he decided to put down his pen, and since then, we have heard nothing from the mangaka about the continuation of the manga.
Currently, the PTSD radio is on an “unofficial hiatus” as nothing was announced by the author. But, most fans consider it finished as what the author faced was genuinely horrifying, and he is still releasing chapters of his other manga, Fuan no Tane.
Do you think the place Masaaki and his staff rented was actually haunted? Let us know your opinion in the comments below.
