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"Mature Content Warning!" |
| “ | He was shocked, and he died. I can imagine how frightened he was. I mean, how could he expect to see something like that? Yes... his looks really changed, but not in the way he expected. He passed away soon after seeing the result... It's a shame, because... I found the real beauty in his transformed body. | „ |
| ~ Mrs. Kawabe describing her husband's death, Flesh-Colored Horror |
Mrs. Kawabe is the main antagonist of the Junji Ito horror story Flesh-Colored Horror. She is the widowed wife of an alchemist who had attempted to find an elixer of life. During one of his attempts to do so, a freak accident occured, where his skin was seperated from the rest of his body. Following this, he died from shock when he discovered his mutilated body.
What Makes Her Pure Evil?[]
- When she saw the corpse of her husband, who was completely skinless, Mrs. Kawabe was not disgusted or shocked at all by the sight. Instead, she had deemed it as a form of "ultimate beauty", and from then on fetishized the idea of being skinless. She had decided to have the same thing done to herself.
- Kawabe didn't deem having her own body transformed enough, as she also attempted to have the same thing done to both her sister Maya, and her son Chikara.
- In Maya's case, it is revealed at the very end of the manga that Kawabe had tricked her into using the medicine on herself, gaslighting her into believing that it would be the only way for her to be truly beautiful. It is also strongly implied that through force and threats, Kawabe had made Maya into her unwilling assistant.
- In Chikara's case, when both Kawabe and Maya had run out of the medicine that would allow people to seperate their skin from their bodies, she began treating Chikara as her own personal guinea pig, despite the fact that each and every test done on him proved to be very painful.
- Although Kawabe claims that she only wants what's best for Chikara by showing him his "true beauty", she is shown to have no true affection towards him, only treating him as an object for her demented experiments.
- After being expelled from school, Chikara tries to come back on several ocassions, peeking through the window. Several scene following this also show him trying to bond with his former teacher and following her around, seeing her as a far suitable parental figure than his own mother. He is also always hesitant at the idea of going back home, showing that he greatly fears his own mother.
- When Takigawa, Chikara's elementary school teacher, tries to convince Mrs. Kawabe to bring her son to a specialist due to his worsening skin condition, she doesn't deem it "that serious", and instead replies by stating that he'll be a good-looking boy "soon enough", intending to put the medicine that scarred him in the first place on him again.
- As Kawabe and Maya begin making the medicine, Chikara is visibly hiding behind a refrigerator curled up into a ball. As his mother approaches him, and grabs him by the arm, he is seen crying as she begins her experiment on him. Despite all of this, she proceeds with the experiment anyway.
- When Maya points out how the experiments keep failing, and how they are affecting Chikara's health, Kawabe simply responds that SHE wants to see his beauty, and how she wants him to see it too, showing that she is forcing Chikara into something that he never agreed to.
- When Kawabe finds out that Maya had been swapping the acid needed to create the concoction with water, she gets enraged with her for trying to "protect" him.
- Kawabe demonstrates that she understands that people find her idea of beauty to be deviant in a scene where she is strolling around the town at night, naked with only her high heels and a cape, and without her skin. She flashes her exposed muscles and tendons to unsuspecting people while asking them if she's beautiful, with the intent of scaring them off, laughing maniacally when they do so, rather than get offended at not being deemed "beautiful". This also implies that the true reason for why she's doing these procedues is more out of sadism than out of a genuine standard of beauty.
- Given how she experimented on her son with the intent of creating more of the formula that her husband had inavertently made, it is highly likely that Kawabe had intended to trick other people into using the chemical on themselves as well, effectively mutilating them for life.
- Kawabe shows no concern for the fact that her son had scratched a kid's face, and peeled the skin off of another's. The only times she ever seems to "discipline" him is by calling him a "bad boy" for peeling at the wallpaper, which the manga implies that he got from her, and the fact that he ran away from home, despite her abusive behavior towards him. The manga also implies that Chikara likely got his violent behaviors from his mother as well, as when she shows her true colors at the end, she threatens Maya with violence when she discovers that she had been swapping the acid with plain water.
External Links[]
- Mrs. Kawabe on the Villains Wiki
- Mrs. Kawabe on the Hate Sink Wiki
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 Pure Evils
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Aido Kagerou | Fortune Teller | Misaki | Mrs. Kawabe | Ringleader | Tomie Kawakami | |