Yukie Sakai is a sprightly young home health aide eager to help her elderly clients. But what seems like a simple, straightforward job quickly turns into a series of increasingly surreal and bizarre adventures that put Yukie’s wits to the test! In one story, she reluctantly takes on the arduous task of caring for three elderly women singlehandedly. But when more and more sick and ailing women mysteriously appear in the house each day, she soon finds herself up to her neck (literally) in old people! In another, she discovers that her senile client has supernatural powers that, if unchecked, could bring about the end of the world! And in yet another, she must contend with a set of sentient dentures hell-bent on controlling elderly minds!
Shintaro Kago is one of the most inventive and twisted visual stylists in manga today. Well known for combining the traditional manga style with a hyper realistic illustration technique, his adventurous, even experimental visual storytelling approach, and his outrageously sexual and scatological subject matter, he single-handedly created his own genre referred to as “fashionable paranoia.” All of his trademark virtues (and vices) are on full display in Dementia 21, a veritable flood of outré, eerie, darkly comedic tales that strain the bounds of the imagination.
“Showing influences from Salvador Dali to Katsuhiro Otomo, the combination of Kago’s precise, expressive, and kinetic line work with his wacky storytelling is at turns engrossing and repulsive. Mature fans of unconventional manga will appreciate the surreal spiral of body horror, tragicomedy, and dark humor.” -- Publishers Weekly
300 page black and white paperback Fantagraphics Books, 2018
