PTSD Radio (Kouishou Rajio or After Effects Radio Network) is a horror manga by Masaaki Nakayama (author of Fuan no Tane), that consists of short, eerie ghost stories. Unlike Fuan No Tane, the stories here aren't completely unrelated and many intertwine at different points. Together, they tell the story of the enigmatic and often malevolent "God of Hair" and the people who worship it, gradually revealing more about the God's history and how it affects the world as its influence waxes and wanes.
Tropes appearing in PTSD Radio:
- Above Good and Evil: While the God of Hair's actions mostly seem malevolent, the narration posits in a few different chapters that gods do not consider things like good and evil the way people do. Instead, they only hunger for worship and sacrifice, and they will take it by force if it is not offered respectfully.
- Anachronic Order: The chapters take place at different times, but many of them intersect or have direct sequels.
- Body Horror: In multiple forms. The tiny, semi-humanoid, multi-jointed things with a deformed facial opening that combines their eye sockets and a perpendicular mouth that try to crawl into people when they sleep or even dropping into and disguising themselves as their drink are a good start. And then there's what started happening to the author.
- Creepy Crows: A vengeful flock of crows follows the protagonist of one chapter. But they aren't really crows...
- Creepy Doll: One story involves a group of kids finding a large sealed doll covered in hair... and whatever was bound to it is furious at being exorcised.
- Cursed Item: A table, from which a ghost inexplicably emerges at night. When it is turned over to a monastery for inspection, the head priest immediately has it incinerated, and shows the owners several nails that had been embedded in the wood. As he explains, it's likely the wood came from a tree used for ushi no toki mairi, turning it into a source of impurity and corruption.
- Demonic Dummy: A straw dummy that might be possessed by the God of Hair (or might be one of its forms) appears.
- Explosive Breeder: The Body Horror things multiply copiously inside human bodies, and exit in a rush via any available orifices.
- Fanservice: Volume 4 has a surprisingly explicit scene of a couple having sex, and the woman is shown fully nude in several panels afterwards before going to take a bath. Of course after that point, it quickly veers into Fan Disservice when she gets attacked.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Discussed in the bonus chapters in which Masaaki Nakayama discusses the strange experiences he and his assistants had while creating the manga. He relays various frightening happenings that took place in their rented office building and connects these to a broken home shrine he found hidden in a closet, and then goes on to state that he isn't including the whole story of what happened. This is because every time he did tell the full story to someone in real life, that person would fall ill or have an accident afterwards, and Nakayama himself became suddenly and seriously ill with a rare blood condition during all of those happenings. His avatar in the manga says that he believes an otherworldly force is sending him a strong message not to tell the whole story, and that it will make good on its threats if he attempts to do so.
- Ghostly Goals: A girl keeps waking up in the middle of the night, seeing a vague, inhuman mouth panting at her side, exhaling a foul-smelling breath. Despite this, the presence also pulls her from crossing a dangerous road, leaving her confused as to what it is and what it wants. Later, it drags her to the family kitchen just in time to see a fire start and for her father to douse the flames. Then she realizes the mysterious ghost is a dog - the late pet of the former owner. She makes sure his grave will be left untouched and thanks him for the help, now sure it's nothing but helpful.
- Laser-Guided Karma:
- A member of a group of school bullies ends up mysteriously comatose after threatening to cut the hair of a weird new kid. Turns out he's not the first one.
- When a group of workers are moving the Hair God's statue, an impatient and disrespectful man smashes part of its head with his trowel. His own head immediately swells up and explodes as punishment.
- Living Shadow: Some manifestations of spirits, if they aren't made out of hair, instead appear as totally black shadow figures. These typically hover around and signify that something bad is imminent in the area (such as a more corporeal horror manifesting).
- Metafiction: Nakayama adds a backup strip relating his own... unusual experiences with something he suspects is horribly related to the story he is telling in the manga.
- Never Suicide: Several characters supposedly commit suicide in various chapters, but in each case it's made clear that something supernatural was at work, though whether it's a Psychic-Assisted Suicide or a killing made to look like the victim did it themselves is not explained.
- The very first volume features a chapter where two men stand on a rooftop and talk about feeling a force that wants to pull them over the edge. A future volume revisits this and reveals that they were two of the school bullies that pushed around Hamaguchi, and that they traveled up there after the apparent suicide of one of the other former bullies years later. The force that pulled their friend off the rooftop to his death is very much real, and it wants to drag them over too.
- One of the chapters taking place in feudal Japan has a samurai commit seppuku in front of an abandoned door that is stained with the image of a grimacing woman. The men who find him note that he's impaled so fully on his own sword that it's doubtful he could have done it under his own power. It's heavily implied that the door was possessed by the spirit of a prostitute who fell in love with the man but was abandoned or killed by him, and that she drew him to his death in revenge.
- Another historical chapter touches on a rash of apparent suicides in the village that worships the God of Hair, all of them heirs to various prominent families. They were being killed by the God itself, thanks to having their hair used in curse rituals that compelled it to take their souls.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: It's suggested that part of the horror began in WWII. A Japanese soldier asked a friend to, should he die in combat, cut off a lock of his hair and take it back home for his family's traditional funerary ceremonies. However, the friend failed this obligation, and instead stopped at a local barbershop and grabbed some of the cut hair, which he presented to the family. The real problem started when the lock of hair was stolen from the container, used in a Ushi no toki mairi - a traditional Japanese curse ritual - and offered to "the hair god".
- Nightmare Face: Deformed faces, with various numbers of eyes, mouths and rows of teeth, are prominent in the ghosts and monsters featured in the stories.
- No Ending: Much like the author's other work, many of the chapters just end with no resolution. Subverted later, as many chapters are revisited later, adding context and filling in the overarching story of the reason behind the nightmarish events. Played Straight with the series on a meta-textual level. The stories are handled akin to a signal fading in and out on a radio. With one of the stories even focusing around the concept itself, with several workers trying to determine what's befallen one of their number, only to never be seen again. The reason why the stories themselves receive no greater resolution is because both A: Nothing Is Scarier and B: Seeking out the ending might result in the reader unwittingly writing their own.
- Pet the Dog: The chapter detailing the story of Kiku and Tsubomi, two sisters who lived in the village that worshipped the God of Hair long ago, shows a kinder side to the god. Tsubomi gets lost in the woods one night while going to search for her father, and Kiku offers some of her hair to the god's statue and prays for it to lead her to her younger sister. It not only does so, but leads them both home completely safely. The end of the chapter reveals that this was the God of Hair's original true nature, and that it only became malevolent over time later, as people misused its power and began to fear and disrespect it.
- Prehensile Hair: Hair and its manipulation is a recurring element of the ghosts in the stories, based on the long-forgotten rituals related to the worship of the God of Hair.
- Protagonist Journey to Villain: It's shown that in the distant past, the God of Hair was a benevolent force that helped villagers as long as its rituals were properly observed. However, its power was badly abused by several prominent people to kill off their rivals and have a largely innocent but compulsively loyal woman pay for the crime. Having its main totem smashed likely didn't help either.
- Psychopomp: One of the God of Hair's initial duties was to carry souls to the afterlife. Several rich villagers killed off their rivals by beckoning the God into taking their souls, which played a part in its eventual corruption.
- Room Full of Crazy: One of the weird boy Hamaguchi's victims obsessively writes invitations to the God of Hair into the walls and floors of his room.
- Sealed Evil in a Can: Twice. The first time, an abandoned shack is explored by two men, who are following a trail of radiation until they find a small box sealed with talismans, which is the source. One of them breaks the talismans to look inside, and finds... nothing. Even the radiation count drops like a stone. Meanwhile, the outside onlookers see a massive shadow escape the shack and dissolve into the night sky in a wave of cold. The second time, an exasperated landlord has a property that has proved impossible to sublet demolished. As he supervises the destruction, for a moment he glimpses a large group of humanoid shadows slowly leaving the remains. Both times, the responsible groups wonder exactly what they just released.
- The Soulless: The nature of "the plucked ones" discussed in one of the chapters that takes place in feudal Japan. In a village where resources were relatively scarce and very large families couldn't always be supported equally, the children of each generation who weren't heirs to the main family would have their souls offered to the God of Hair and thus "plucked" out. This rendered them emotionless and mindlessly loyal servants to the family.
- Surreal Horror: Horrible things happen to people for no discernible reason they can understand... the problem is, those horrors often turn out to have their own logic, which doesn't mesh with human understanding.
- Traumatic Haircut: Done to a young girl in a rural village, though apparently as some kind of ritualistic safety precaution by her family, to stop the "god of hair" from taking it, and threatened towards a strange transfer student by a gang of bullies. Later on, there are indicia that it's a very old tradition, that has something to do with the ultimate source of whatever's happening.
- Your Head A-Splode: If the initial curse wasn't bad enough, when "the hair god" statue was being moved, an impatient worker smashed its statue with a mallet, deforming it. The god struck back by grotesquely inflating his head until it popped like a balloon, and remotely killing the overseeing priest by blowing off everything above his jaw.