Fuan no Tane (Manga)

This is a very well-known series among people who visit paranormal imageboards, but I guess I can't expect everyone to have wasted a year's worth of their life on a chan site.

Fuan no Tane is a three-volume series that illustrates Japanese urban legends. Each chapter is very short, some of them only being two pages long. This greatly helps it. Each story jumps right into the freaky thing. There's no continuity to worry about and no characters to keep up with. Just weird shit that will creep you out.

Since the stories are based on Japanese stories, not all of them will make sense, and the ones that do make sense to an English-language reader probably won't hold the significance that they would to a Japanese reader. But I think that's a good thing. If someone tries to tell me about Bloody Mary, I scoff, because I've heard it before. I imagine that's how a Japanese person would react to some of these stories. "Kids on a sign come to life and cause a car wreck? Heard it - it's not true." But non-Japanese people won't know the stories and will be amazed at them. "A human-like lizard crawling across the top of a skyscraper? Damn, that's scary."

Also, because there are so many stories, you're sure to find something you like, something that unsettles you. Always been afraid of ghosts? Got it. Monster babies? Got it. Strange attackers that defy reason? Got it. And the art fits it all perfectly. It's simple but can be very detailed. It's like it lulls you into a sense of peace, right before it throws some horrifying thing at you.

This series has not been licensed or released in English (which makes sense as the stories are about Japanese urban legends), but it has been scanlated into English and posted across the internet. It's not hard to find, and I highly recommend it.

Note: There is a Fuan no Tane + (Plus) that has more stories, but only four chapters of it have been scanlated, due to bad raws.