If there is a theme to this third omnibus volume of Kazuo Umezz's horror manga Orochi, it is that we can't always know everything about someone from the face they present to the world. While both stories in this volume, “Stage” and “Combat,” also deal with sons' relationships with their fathers, the fathers-and-sons element of the pieces take a backseat to the idea that people will hide their worst selves behind a smiling, kind face, and that uncovering those hidden elements of someone's personality and past isn't always a good thing. Each tale takes a slightly different approach to this idea, with “Stage” ending on a note of finality and “Combat” leaving things up to our interpretation.

Orochi keeps to the observer's role this time, watching as two sons across two very different stories try to reconcile their feelings about what they discover about the older men in their lives. The longer "Combat" chapter is the more substantial story of the two. This isn't only because "Stage" is a genuinely convoluted revenge story but more because there's something intensely recognizable about the tale of Tadashi Okabe and his dad. The senior Okabe was a soldier in WWII, and he's irrevocably scarred by his experiences, trying as best he can to redeem himself from the boy he was at the time. Tadashi, learning about his father's actions as a child in the post-war period, can't even begin to imagine that the world wasn't always as black-and-white as it appears to him, and his father's inability to talk about what he did only makes things worse. This is not an uncommon issue between fathers and children of the post-WWII era, and indeed I can see my father's relationship with his father in the depiction of the Okabe father and son. Okabe Senior is a survivor of Guadalcanal, and after he and his fellow soldiers were forced to flee into the jungle by the Allied Forces, the men had to resort to previously unthinkable means of survival. As the youngest soldier, Okabe's survival became the particular project of one of his fellows. Okabe now finds himself with survivor's guilt and generalized feelings of shame and horror based on his actions and what he had to do to survive.

The crux of the matter here is that he cannot bring himself to talk to his son, nor can the son manage to tell his father what he's learned. We only know what happened because Orochi uses her powers to slip into the man's bedroom to read his dreams, and as readers with the benefit of distance from the war, we can see that, like so many veterans, what Okabe needs is therapy and understanding. But thirteen-year-old Tadashi has largely been insulated from the realities of what the soldiers had to do. The horror comes from his distrust of his father and the fact that the man who tells him what his father did during the war is himself scarred by his terrible experiences. Does that make Okabe less guilty or less of a good father and teacher? (It's worth noting that while I couldn't find a record of Umezz's father fighting in the war, he was a teacher.) The ambiguous ending, where both Okabes have to decide how much they can trust each other in a bleak situation, is a haunting reminder of that question.

“Stage,” on the other hand, takes a different approach to anger and guilt. The protagonist of that story, Yuichi, went out alone when he was three, planning to meet his father as he walked home. They did meet up, but his father was struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver, and when Yuichi tried to tell others who did it – a beloved children's entertainer – no one believed him because of his age. Yuichi soon becomes an angry, brooding young man who sees his opportunity for revenge when he realizes what's become of the man who left his television show after the trial and his acquittal. Again, Orochi takes mostly an observational role, only stepping in once when Yuichi is being picked on, and unlike “Combat,” in this one, she's largely in the dark. That gives this story more of a mystery feel. While it isn't all that difficult to figure out what's going on, Yuichi's plot is genuinely convoluted, relying on increasingly odd contingencies, every single one of which he's planned for. It's still a good story, but it lacks the emotional heft of “Combat,” and it feels as if Orochi herself isn't necessary; she doesn't seem to learn anything about the humans she's so fascinated with, nor does she have much to think about after the story's done. “Stage” probably would go over better were it not paired with “Combat;” it's a far cry and unfortunate comparison with the grounded feel of the latter.

While these are both still clearly horror stories, they're less about supernatural horror and more about the horror we make for ourselves. War, revenge, and other uniquely human monstrosities are the villains of the piece, and it's when we fail to recognize what humanity is capable of that we create monsters to distract from who the real demons are.