Helter Skelter by Kyoko Okazaki: Beauty and Body Horror

Kyoko Okazaki’s manga Helter Skelter still cuts deep. A fever dream about beauty, power, and the terrifying cost of perfection.

Liliko: Manufactured Icon in Freefall

A Face Everywhere

In 1990s Japan, Liliko is the face of fashion — omnipresent on billboards, magazine covers, TV screens. Her beauty is blinding, sculpted to perfection through full-body cosmetic surgery. Not a wrinkle, not a shadow out of place. But behind that smooth surface lies something raw and rotten.

Liliko is more than a model. She’s a product, built and maintained to serve the industry. But beauty doesn’t age well in a system obsessed with novelty. As younger faces emerge and Liliko’s surgically reconstructed body begins to fail, panic sets in.

Glamour vs. Control

Liliko’s fall isn’t sudden. It’s slow, calculated, wrapped in fur and glitter. She lashes out at assistants. She spirals into drug use. But still, she performs. Her breakdown is public, yet no one looks away. The spectacle is part of her allure — and her imprisonment.

Okazaki paints Liliko as both predator and prey. Her power comes from her body, but it’s also what traps her. She is always being looked at, and she knows how to weaponize that gaze — until it turns against her.

Body Horror in High Fashion

Reconstructed Flesh

“Everything’s fake except the bones, eyeballs, hair, ears and twat.” That’s how Liliko is described in one of Helter Skelter’s most chilling lines. Her body, completely rebuilt, is now deteriorating. Bruises bloom beneath her makeup. Clumps of hair fall out. Her body is rebelling, rejecting the illusion of perfection.

But she keeps going. She has to. There’s no place for “real” in this world — only the flawless and the broken.

Helter Skelter or Beauty as Chaos

What makes Helter Skelter so disturbing isn’t the gore — it’s how easily horror slides into everyday glam. Okazaki’s panels mirror fashion spreads. Editorial layouts frame Liliko’s collapse. Blood becomes part of the aesthetic. In this world, beauty is a form of violence: directed at others, and at the self.

The title Helter Skelter refers to a sense of chaos, disorder, and rapid descent — originally a British term for a spiraling amusement park slide, later culturally loaded by the Beatles and the Manson murders. In Kyoko Okazaki’s manga, it perfectly captures the frantic unraveling of Liliko’s constructed identity: the glamour, the body, the fame — all spiraling out of control.

The world she inhabits is dazzling on the surface, but beneath it lies a helter-skelter collapse of self, both physical and psychological. The title isn’t just a mood — it’s a trajectory.

The manga offers no clean moral. There’s no lesson, no healing arc. Instead, it exposes the machinery of fame and asks: what happens when the product breaks? Who do we blame — the industry, or the woman who played along too well?

Kyoko Okazaki’s Legacy and the Enduring Relevance of Helter Skelter

Ahead of Its Time

Published in Feel Young magazine between 1995 and 1996, Helter Skelter came long before the era of filters, filler, and online beauty cults. Yet its themes feel even sharper today. Okazaki anticipated a culture obsessed with image manipulation, constant visibility, and the disposable nature of female icons.

She understood the female body as a battleground — not just in private, but as a public performance.

Other authors have explored the anxieties of womanhood in modern Japan — Ai Yazawa in Nana, through the emotional turbulence of love, ambition, and friendship; or Moyoco Anno in Happy Mania, with her sharp, chaotic portraits of female desire. But Kyoko Okazaki’s Helter Skelter stands apart: colder, more brutal, and unapologetically surgical in its critique.

A Cultural Mirror

The 2012 film adaptation by Mika Ninagawa, starring Erika Sawajiri, gave Helter Skelter a new, hyper-saturated visual language. But the manga remains more intimate, more jagged. Its black-and-white panels refuse comfort. They expose.

Okazaki’s vision of beauty as decay, control as delusion, and liberation through ruin still resonates. Because Liliko isn’t just a character. She’s a reflection — of an industry, a culture, a fantasy we all help maintain.

Note: Helter Skelter deals with mature themes: body modification, mental illness, sexuality, abuse, drug use, and suicide. It’s disturbing — and intentionally so.