Long Hair

The Long Hair in the Attic is a Japanese horror manga by Junji Ito. It’s about a girl with long hair who gets dumped by her boyfriend.

A teenage girl named Chiemi is out on a date with her boyfriend. She is shocked when he breaks up with her, He tells her it’s because of her looks. She tried to look her best for him, but he still isn’t satisfied. He lets her out of the car and drives off.

When she goes home, her sister, Eri, tells her that they have a problem with mice in the attic. Chiemi can hear them scurrying about in the ceiling above her bedroom, making a noise like: Tep… Tep… Tep… Tep… Tep…

Chiemi is very depressed about her breakup. She takes out an old picture of herself and her ex-boyfriend together and burns it. Then, she cries herself to sleep.

The next morning, when Chiemi wakes up, she is disgusted to find a dead mouse tangled up in her hair.

She runs into the bathroom and washes it out.

“How could a mouse get into my hair?” she wonders. “So disgusting!”

Chiemi decides to cut off all her hair and asks Eri to help her.

Eri goes downstairs to ask her mother for a scissors. All of a sudden, they hear Chiemi screaming. When they rush upstairs, they are horrified by what they see. Chiemi’s decapitated body is lying on the floor.

Eri and her mother start screaming. Pandemonium breaks out. The neighbors hear the cries and come to help. Nobody can understand what happened and Chiemi’s head is nowhere to be found.

“It’s the mice!” Eri screams. “They chewed it off!”

The police are called, but they can’t find the head either. All they can determine is that it was cut off with some sort of sharp blade. Some of the neighbors think Chiemi committed suicide, but if that’s the case, then where is her head?

A week later, Chiemi’s ex-boyfriend is awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call. When he answers it, there’s no one on the other end of the line, just a strange noise. Krish… Krish… Krish… It sounds like someone grinding their teeth.

Eri wants to check the attic for mice, so she asks her father for a flashlight. He insists on going into the attic to check for himself. Eri waits at the bottom of the ladder. When he doesn’t come back, she calls his name, but he doesn’t answer. Cautiously, Eri climbs the ladder and peeks into the attic.

She finds her father slumped against the wall. She checks his pulse, but he’s dead and there is a look of sheer terror on his face.

When she looks around, she sees something that horrifies her. Chiemi’s severed head is hanging there, suspended from the rafters by the hair.

Eri reaches out to touch the head, but it swings away. The long hair is moving as if it’s alive.

The hair pulls open Chiemi’s eyes and pulls back her lips, making her grind her teeth.

The long hair unhooks itself from the rafters and slithers across the attic floor, dragging the head behind it. Eri follows it as it drops through the hatch and crawls down the stairs.

As the hair slithers out of the house and vanishes into the night, Eri realizes that her sister’s hair came to life and killed her because it didn’t want to be cut off.

The hair goes to the house of Chiemi’s ex-boyfriend and it torments him, slowly crawling through the cracks in the walls and ceiling.