Going into this as an attempted Nishioka completionist with mixed expectations, I got mixed results, but it's still solidly above average and one of the better adaptations I've seen of Franz Kafka's stories, especially in the anthology format. It uses the child-like, ornate, and geometrical art style the siblings have always been known for to great effect, but the nature of some of these stories is perhaps not as amenable to comic format as the artist would like, and sometimes I even feel that being beholden to render faithful adaptations of another's work is hampering much of the beauty that stems from their unique style.In the first place, the Nishioka siblings use a sparser amount of dialogue in most of their work, but they've taken the route here of using quite a few passages from Kafka, sometimes out of necessity, but certain segments, Metamorphosis in particular, are swimming in lengthy paragraphs. I felt like I was rereading the whole story, just with the idiosyncratic Nishioka art. Sometimes I feel the words or the art are at odds to a mild degree, and that the art may as well have metamorphized into a new story altogether, but, like the author, I've also never been too keen on this particular story, but I'll admit, the grotesque beauty of their art lends it a quality beyond my memories of the prose. Whereas some of these stories fall flat next to my memories, the corridors of the home are suffused with a gothic intensity that elevate it above all of the blah blah blah whining of the narrator.

Cares of a Family Man, the story with the strange creature Odradek was always one that left me with an odd feeling, and it was very interesting to see this one adapted, as I didn't always have the easiest time imagining it, and it seemed almost as if it were meant to exist beyond imagining—you could imagine it, but the imaginings would never be fixed. Plenty of prose exists in that fashion, where it's meant to get your imagination jogging, in fantastical or nightmarish ways. To fix the unusualness of these scenes in the Nishioka style, well, their interpretation of everything is interesting, but it adds to and takes away from the story. The layouts and sense of geometry in this one are great—especially the opening pages.

I can't remember the Bucket Rider very well from when I read all of these stories, but it's like a fairytale of childish tragic nonsense: "Please fill my bucket with coal, or I'll lose my bucket, and if I lose my bucket, I won't be able to get coal anymore, because the buckets at the store are too expensive. My bucket is going to fly away into outer space, so I have to sit on it, and, well, I guess I'll see you in hell, where it will be warm enough that I won't need your coal." Silliness married with a hint of the anxiety-based nightmare is what a lot of these stories thrived on. Other stories, like A Fratricide, are just as flat as I remember them being. Of course, as one serial killer seems to crawl around every Nishioka book, they were, I'm sure, eager to adapt this absurdity, which in some ways seems the most mundane of Kafka's works.

My favorites were always A Country Doctor, A Hunger Artist, and In the Penal Colony. The first of these is not as visually striking as I would have hoped, and in terms of composition and design, it even looks a bit plain compared to a few others. It gets all of the high points right, but I was always distracted by the weird character design of the doctor. In the first frame, I actually thought it was a young man with his back turned to the audience, bending over backwards, so he can stare at us. I kept thinking this every time I saw the doctor, who is in most of the panels, so this had a touch of unintentional comedy. A Hunger Artist is another that has quite impressive layouts, and I imagine it was a challenge to portray such a simple story. In the Penal Colony was also among the finest, but I think it suffers a little bit from the same problems I felt with the Odradek story, where a big part of the strangeness is lost because this peculiar thing is being translated by your mind; the Nishioka siblings fixed it to paper instead, and it loses some of the magic, but this one had strong surrealist imagery that made it work quite well; however, the story was probably truncated the most of any of them, and it felt a bit too brief as a closer.

Most of the other shorts were largely an improvement, and probably even A Fratricide was elevated above the original. Sometimes I think it might be the Kafka stories themselves that I have mixed feelings about. Even The Trial was left unfinished, and his stories often have a fragmentary nature. I'm not even sure they lend themselves that well to direct adaptation. Kafka is probably best left to either being an influence, or his works might even benefit from a kind of loose adaptation. There are many fascinating ideas, but these ideas can easily be spun in new ways.