Thought “PTSD Radio Vol. 2” would repeat Vol. 1’s scratchy late-night jump-cuts; turns out Nakayama has tuned the dial and caught a single, sustained frequency of dread.
The premise still crackles: stray radio waves of terror hitch a ride on human hair, on crow feathers, on a stone monument that rises from a burial mound looking unmistakably like a cracked marble phallus—glans, ridges, everything. What changes is the signal strength. Where Vol. 1 scattered micro-stories like static, Vol. 2 lingers, letting one vignette bleed into the next until Edo-period samurai, modern office workers and a lonely cyclist realize they share a common tinnitus: PTSD-FM in the back of the skull.
Black pages whisper white text—“DO NOT STARE INTO THE ASKER’S EYES”—like legal IDs between pirate broadcasts. The art drills closer than ever: follicles rendered hair by hair; a severed top-knot sucked into a sliding door’s painted mouth; an eyeless girl whose fringe hangs like vertical stitching across her own face. Panels feel tactile, as though you could pluck the strands—then remember in this universe hair is an antenna and flinch.
Classic kaidan DNA shows through the noise. The haunted wig of Okiku, the Jizō statue that walks at night, the Edo rumor of doors that eat people: Nakayama samples them all, loops them under a modern drone of predictive anxiety. Free will? Irrelevant. Fear moves through the population like FM waves, each scalp a relay point, each haircut a new broadcast tower. By the final chapter you no longer ask why the monument looks like a buried god’s erection; you ask what happens when its shadow finally reaches your own doorstep.
The book stumbles when characters pause to spell out the curse—exposition feels like listening to a DJ read Wikipedia—but the slow-burn structure pays off. Fewer one-page stingers, more connective tissue; suddenly the series feels less anthology, more creeping epic.
Verdict: 4/5. Vol. 1 was a mixtape; Vol. 2 is the concept album. Keep reading if you like your horror to seep, not jump.
Craving further broadcasts on the same wavelength?
• Fuan no Tane (Nakayama’s prototype) - replays urban legends in thirty-second bursts.
• Junji Ito’s Uzumaki spirals dread through the body like radio interference.
• Mieruko-chan by Tomoki Izumi - lets ghosts flicker at the edge of vision and dares its heroine not to tune in.