Hello, again! As we continue our Halloween mini-tour, I’ve decided to take a look at another story by Junji Ito. This one, like the one I talked about before, is also from the short story collection Shiver.

Today we’re going to discuss the first story in the anthology, “Used Record.”

We open on two teenage girls, Ogawa and Nakayama, listening to a vinyl record at Ogawa’s house. The song they’re listening to has no lyrics (just random vocalizations), seems to start in the middle of the song, then just trails off as if the singer loses interest at the end. The case for it is also completely blank, so neither girl knows who the singer is. Ogawa also really doesn’t want to tell Nakawama how she got the record, and also doesn’t want to let her tape it so she can have her own copy.

This leads to a gigantic fight between the two friends, which in turn leads to Ogawa kicking Nakayama out of her house. Then, right after Nakayama leaves, Ogawa realizes that she stole the record.

Ogawa then chases Nakayama down the street, eventually stopping her by throwing a rock into her back. Ogawa chastises her friend for stealing and tells her that she won’t go to the police if Nakayama just gives her the record back.

Nakayama responds to this reasonably, and gives her friend her record back. I’m kidding, she actually bashes Ogawa’s head in with a rock.

So now she’s pretty freaked out, because she’s, y’know, killed her friend, and sets about hiding the body in a nearby construction site, covering her with a tarp. That’s when something weird happens: Ogawa starts singing the song they were listening to earlier. Nakayama thinks that maybe Ogawa is alive after all (spoiler: she’s not), then decides to just leave her, promising to give the record back after she’s taped it.

This is when Nakayama runs into a problem: she has no record player, and is having a lot of trouble finding one. However, she does come across a used record store in her travels and thinks that they’d be able to help her out. The owner, however, is extremely curt and tells her that he only sells records, and that he won’t put one on for her.

Then the owner recognizes the record in question, and we learn how Ogawa got it: she stole it from this very establishment. Well, that explains why she didn’t want to tell Nakayama earlier. It gets worse, though, because the record owner didn’t get a good look at Ogawa (saying he only knows it was a teenage girl) and thinks that Nakayama stole it. I mean, she did, but not from this particular dude.

The shop owner becomes extremely irate, saying that the record is worth more to him than his life, and chases Nakayama out of the store. She manages to escape him after he briefly grabs her sleeve, and ducks into a nearby jazz cafe.

Now safe, at least for the moment, Nakayama orders an orange juice and asks the waiter if they’re playing music from the radio. The waitress explains it’s a record player, and Nakayama sees her chance. She asks if she can put on her own record, and describes what it sounds like to the waiter. Since the waiter identifies it as scat (which is a real singing style that is actually called that) which fits the jazzy theming, she agrees.

After the song is over, a rather gaunt young man who was sitting at the bar the whole time approaches her, and actually knows about the record and who recorded it: a singer named Paula Bell. Thing is, though, that the record was recorded after she’d been killed in a hit and run outside of the studio. That’s why the recording is so strange: it begins in the middle because the tech didn’t press the button until after she’d started, and it trails off because whatever strength was animating her was exhausted.

Nakayama, who really doesn’t like the way that this guy is looking at her, packs the record up, thanks him for the information, and then beats a hasty retreat. Only to find, as soon as she leaves, that the dude is following her. She runs, and runs right back into the record shop owner, who also starts chasing her.

Eventually she comes across the site where she left Ogawa’s body, and is surprised to see her still there, since she was singing when she left. Then she has a horrified look as she connects this to the story she just heard. She doesn’t get to ruminate on this long, though, because the record store owner has caught up to her.

She hides behind a stack of logs as the man whips off the tarp covering Ogawa’s body, and is momentarily kind of freaked out. Meanwhile, Nakayama climbs the logs to scale a nearby wall, only to come face to face with the creepy dude. Startled, she falls off the wall and crushed to death by the logs, dropping the record on the other side of the wall.

The creepy guy picks it up as the record store owner searches frantically for it, and we end on this little tableau:

So that was “Used Record.” This little yarn bears a similarity in theme to one of Ito’s most popular works, Uzumaki. That theme would be obsession, and the destructive powers that it holds. This obviously supernatural record has such a hold on people that they’re willing to kill for it. It ultimately proves self destructive for Nakayama.

I guess the moral here is that you should always check your used vinyl for ghosts.

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