Blackstar.
Summary
Rohan Kishibe is sitting at a café, drawing meaningless lines in his sketchbook on his day off. He has a visitor at his table, who stares at the lines that Rohan is drawing. The man has white skin, blue eyes, wears a suit, and has a muscular appearance reminiscent of an NFL player. The lines that originally seemed meaningless now formed the face of a person as if it were a portrait. Rohan didn't intend to draw a human face, as he actually only drew lines and dots. In gestalt psychology, this phenomenon is referred to as the Law of Prägnanz, in which humans have a psychological tendency to find something meaningful in an irregular pattern of dots and lines. Humans perceive the invisible as visible, and this law is said to explain most photos of "ghosts". Whenever Rohan draws manga, he always questions if his lines have any meaning. Manga artists must not draw meaningless things, because things without meaning have no reality. The man acknowledges Rohan's claim but rebuts that this rule doesn't apply in all cases, and sometimes people see things that they shouldn't. Rohan is shocked and asks whether the man is an editor of an occult magazine. However, the man states that he's an agent like he told Rohan earlier, and gives him a business card. Rohan learns that his name is Agent Gabriel (エージェント・ガブリエル, Ējento Gaburieru).
A week ago, the man contacted Rohan claiming to be an agent from an American foundation and had a request for him. It wasn't unusual for Rohan to get requests from overseas since he was a popular manga artist but Gabriel's request was different. Rohan admits that Gabriel is a determined guy to come all the way from America to Japan for the sake of commissioning a portrait. Gabriel thanks him but Rohan states it wasn't a compliment. Gabriel apologizes, bowing his head. Rohan feels that the nature of his request and his behavior is suspicious, but doesn't feel any sense of danger from him. Rather, Gabriel gives off the impression of a thick boulder towering over him, making Rohan feel as if he was being protected from some kind of threat.
Although Rohan is confident that his sketches are comparable to Picasso, he feels that Gabriel's offer of $500,000 for a single sketch is too excessive. Gabriel responds that his foundation determined that Rohan's sketch is worth exactly that much, because he is the only person in the world who can draw a portrait of the Spaghetti Man (スパゲッティ・マン, Supagetti Man). Rohan could never forget that name after a recent encounter he had with the strange man. He accepts Gabriel's request, deciding that the Spaghetti Man will be the next thing he draws. Rohan takes out a twisted metal rod from his bag, revealing that it used to be a pen but was transformed into a spaghetti-like shape. He points to a scribble in his sketchbook, noticing how a man's face emerges from the random lines. Rohan then pulls out a stack of photos from his bag, revealing how the man in all of his pictures looks the same as the face in his sketch. Rohan claims that the Spaghetti Man was an urban legend, but just recently, Rohan had become its only survivor. Rohan starts telling his story to Gabriel.
Rohan was researching urban legends at the time. He learned that the Spaghetti Man was seen all over the world and posted on the Internet. While sorting his reference photos, Rohan noticed a mysterious man in one of them. It was a photo of Morioh's atmosphere on a late afternoon, depicting the local residents and tourists in the town coming and going. Among the crowd of pedestrians facing sideways, there was one man facing forward as if he was looking directly at Rohan. The man wore a sagging suit and a crumpled hat, with a faint smile on his face. Feeling as if the man looked unnatural, Rohan looked through over thirty photos and also saw the same man in all of them. He looked exactly the same, as if he were a duplicate. Rohan's photos weren't from the same time period nor the same location. They spanned over several years, either being in Morioh, Tokyo, a village deep in the mountains, or on the roadside in Tuscany, Italy. Rohan was horrified wondering why the man was in every place he had been to, thinking he had some kind of stalker. However, he thought this would be a great subject for a manga and decided to research it. He found several articles on the Internet mentioning the Spaghetti Man, but everyone who supposedly encountered the man went missing.
The origin of the urban legend is traced back to three specific encounters. The first person who encountered the Spaghetti Man was an American freelance journalist who Rohan decides to tentatively name Charles (チャールズ, Chāruzu) for the story. Charles was preparing an article when he noticed the man's existence in photos he took of an abandoned city. There were only supposed to be demolished buildings there, and Charles was certain he didn't see anyone while he was there, yet the man was in all of his photos. Charles posted the photos on his news site and asked if his readers could identify the man. His article became the most-viewed on his site, but Charles vanished not long after. His disappearance piqued curiosity around the world and people started editing photos together, causing others to suspect that Charles' photos were also fake. However, then the next encounter occurred.
In Japan, a university student who Rohan names Kanako (カナコ), had a hobby of taking selfies and posting them on social media sites. Kanako would get many comments on her photos, but she stopped posting them one day. When asked why by a friend, she revealed that she kept seeing a strange man coming closer and closer to her. She immediately deleted the first photo she saw with him in it and didn't take any more photos, but since then, she would gradually see the man in the corner of her eye. After eventually seeing the man in her room, she screamed and woke up her roommate, who called an ambulance due to Kanako's fear. Kanako tried going to the police, but they couldn't help since there was no actual damage, and also advised her to go to a psychiatrist. Kanako decided she could no longer stay in her dormitory and decided to leave to live with her parents when she suddenly vanished and still hasn't been found by her family.
The final encounter was in Shanghai, China, with a university student who Rohan names Chan (チャン). Chan worked at a part-time job monitoring social media and news sites to censor anti-government posts. Chan wasn't patriotic, but liked that he had access to a large amount of information. Taking advantage of his position, Chan started a forum calling users around the world to investigate the previous two encounters. He was able to verify that both "Charles" and "Kanako" were real and had gone missing, as there were strange remains found at their disappearance sites. Their belongings such as smartphones, pens, and lipstick, were all stretched impossibly thin and twisted bizarrely, resembling spaghetti. Thus, Chan coined the alias "Spaghetti Man" for the mysterious man. Around this time, Chan stopped appearing on the forum as he was fired from his job for posting delusional information online. Chan complained that he was seeing the man everywhere, thinking it was someone from the government watching him. He posted a desperate plea for help online and then vanished as well, leaving behind twisted remains of the electronics in his apartment. Since then, people were afraid to talk about the Spaghetti Man, but sightings continued to be reported. This section requires expansion.
Appearances
Gallery
Ultra Jump August 2017
