That is the haunting beginning of “Hanging Blimp” from master horror writer and artist Junji Ito. It's from his short story collection, Junji.

My name is Melanconnie, and I am an illustrator living in Bogota, and lover of all horror, especially the horror of absurdity. I discovered Ito’s work at the age of 12, scrolling in the darkness of 2009 Tumblr. In those days, the media was full of unrestricted violence, self hatred content, teenage angst and romanticized depression. When it was a pain to be in my own skin, I discovered a strange, morbid solace in body horror and horror of the absurd in Ito’s work. 

I always wanted to become an illustrator, so I started devouring Ito’s manga and similar content in anime.  I felt back then that Ito really understood the horrors of being a teenager, later on I discovered he understands the horrors of being a human. 

His work, so foreign to me, a young artist born and raised in Colombia, took me away from the normal tropical landscapes, and made me travel far away into Japan. From Ito’s eyes I saw a new perspective of the country that was my obsession since childhood. A dark, reproachable Japanese society, then even as different as it was from mine, was similar in that sense. 

Now, I am going to try to dissect Ito’s work, creative process, philosophy and life using his own words from his biographical and self-analyzing book, “Uncanny: The origins of fear.” Published in the USA by VIZ Media which has brought out several of his collections. (Show book) 

Ito asks, “what kinds of images pop up in your head when you hear the words, “murderous desire” or “madness?” Concepts like these are hard to immediately visualize and even if a picture of some sort did come to mind, it's likely to be a different picture for everyone. To take this kind of abstract idea and produce a picture that people would look at and find scary is extremely difficult.”

He adds, “the delusional desire to have something mysterious happen to me in real life might just be the driving force for me to produce new stories.”

And it is this mystery that starts the “Hanging Blimp”. What happened to our main character, Kazuko’s best friend – Terumi Fujino? Why did she kill herself?

Ito was born on a summer day in 1963 in Nakatsugawa – a lush green place. He lived in a two story wooden ancient duplex. His father drank, but was very shy by nature and when he was sober – a very reserved man. His father was very good at drawing but gave it up because of family circumstances.

He remembered as a child, to go to the bathroom in his house – he had to go through an underground hallway.  He says, “when I think about it now, I can see how this strange underground hallway and the dubious storage room might very well have been the origin of what I feel to be terror.”

After finishing high school, he was worried about his future and decided to become a dental technician on the suggestion of his aunt. Making fake teeth. He thought about art school, but concluded the most he could ever be is an art teacher. “Not to toot my own horn, but I was extremely good at sculpting teeth.”

The floundering tooth company paid him on commission and he barely took home enough money to pay his expenses. Realizing that he was in a monotonous low paying job, and his anxiety led him to explore drawing and becoming a manga artist – he said he had a premonition of his own death. 

Ito says, “the boundary between life and death is ambiguous . The fact that I was abnormally frightened of death as a child, and the fact that children can enjoy getting lost in scary stories is perhaps because children grasp that being alive and being dead are equally probable.”

Here Ito goes into both the hysteria surrounding stardom and the relentless obsession of fans to push their idol over the edge. And the mass and copycat suicides sometimes associated with teenagers especially in Japan. Ito has an almost emotional detachment from the mental plague infecting everyone – often a theme you see in his other stories. 

Ito states, “There is the fear that comes from not knowing exactly how other people see you, and the fear of not understanding the point of your own existence. Perhaps the “self” is a primal fear shared among human beings.”

In talking about his characters in the world he builds, he adds, “In crafting a story, my priority is the creation of a worldview.  I have almost no interest in drawing the idiosyncrasies of my characters. By pushing aside elements like individual personalities and relationships, I hope to be able to depict insanity, narcissism, social approval, self-esteem, and other universal desires and inclinations. They are nothing more than one of many elements in constructing the world.”

Ito moves us forward through the perspective of Kazuko. At a certain point, we assume that Kazuko and Shiraishi will end up together. They have a very sympathetic friendship building from the death of their best friend. But this never goes anywhere.

Ito adds, “I think the less personality a character has and the more neutral they are, the more fitting they are as a guide to lead the readers into a fantastical world. My usual pattern is that once the protagonist leaves for the adventure they are never coming back. The protagonist has to encounter a strange phenomenon with an extremely normal outlook. Otherwise the reader won't be surprised by or afraid of the irrational incident. In other words, they must not overcome the terror.”

Now we reach a new level of terror. Everything is revealed and Kazuko knows that her friend is the initiator of this plague. The floating heads are a virus or better comparison are zombies searching for brains to eat. They are hard to kill and they seem to be everywhere. 

Ito talks at length of how he conceived the idea. “ I was standing all by myself in an unusually large airport. Suddenly I looked out at the sky, and I saw something in the distance flying towards me. When it got closer I saw that it was a doll with long, yellow hair with a rope in an U shape hanging down from it. The doll was charging me with ferocious speed to try and snag my neck in its rope. In fear for my life, I ran trying desperately to escape, but the doll finally caught up with me. This dream I had as a boy was the start of my story, “Hanging Blimp.” 

At first, I had the picture of a corpse with a rope around its neck hanging from a regular black rubber balloon. It drifted through the sky like a UFO, and some unfathomable incident happened when it appeared over town. I wanted to draw it as some ominous portent. 

However, absolutely nothing came to mind or the incomprehensible event at the heart of it. I wrestled with a bunch of ideas until I had the thought that it could be interesting if the blimp itself tried to hang people. And rather than a single black balloon, a group of them would attack in formation.

Even so, the story was weak. It didn’t jump off the page when I tried to illustrate it, and I was having trouble thinking of other elements to build it up. So, I grappled with the whole thing some more, and just when I was sick of thinking about it and went to take a bath, I suddenly had the idea of giving the balloons human faces. These blimps would be doppelgangers, and they would attack and hang the person on the face. This would be more visually interesting than a plain round balloon, and it would also make the balloon attack inevitable and inescapable. 

One important point in creating a story is to build the limits into it that forces the protagonist to do what you want them to do. You can’t neglect the little things if you want to create an aura of urgency and fear. If I hadn’t given these details the thought that I did, readers would have found any number of ways to escape the horror. For instance, If the balloon got shot and deflated the person would also die. For the same reason, I decided the line attached to the blimp was made of steel so that it couldn’t be cut with scissors.”

Kazuko is now alone and trapped in her house. Her entire family and everyone around her have given themselves over to their doppelganger. She is the lone survivor but for how long? The ending is very reminiscent of the classic film, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” . In the film, a series of alien spores or pods land on earth and quickly duplicate by injecting and replicating a human host when the person falls asleep. Eventually the real human is replaced by a mindless, complacent duplicate of themselves, but an alien. By the end of the film, nearly the entire human race is gone and only a few humans remain – hiding and trying to survive by staying awake.

Ito concludes, “as a horror manga artist, I sincerely want to create thoroughly unfamiliar creatures that don’t fit into any previous monster mold. By combining something that does exist with something else that exists, you can create a new thing you’ve never seen before. For readers to look at pictures and feel real, we need to allow the reader to believe that the characters in the manga are living in the same space and with the same rules as those of us in the real world.”

And truly, Ito has done this referencing other great literary and science fiction work, but making the “Hanging Blimp” entirely his own, and very Japanese.