This story was added to Frankenstein, the tenth volume of Horror World of Junji Ito, in a 2000 reprint published as Cherished Collection.
Plot
Yagawa visits Dr. Otake, a dental specialist who is treating her. He has installed a new mechanical chair with two thick rods that go into the patient's ears to secure their face. The chair makes her very uneasy, and she feels that it looks like a torture device; but he assures her it is a new development designed to capture an accurate image of the lower jaw. Dr. Otake tries to take an impression of Yagawa's jaw, but the machine fails to start. He leaves her in the chair while he goes to fix the problem. However, he falls down the stairs and is seriously injured. He is rushed to hospital with no one aware that Yagawa is still trapped in the chair.
Yagawa isn't rescued for many hours. Her face and body are crippled with the strain of the chair. She is aware that the treatment rooms on this floor are not used often, and that it's possible no one will save her. As time goes on and it becomes night, she grows paranoid. Yagawa convinces herself that she was tricked into coming to the hospital and that she is being tortured. She reaches up to try and unscrew the rods but can't find anything there. Yagawa becomes more and more frantic, and flips her body up onto the frame above the chair. She realizes that the only way to escape is to force her head out from the bottom; but the metal rods begin to tear through the skin of her ears. Yagawa screams in agony.
Some years later, a woman in a bar recounts this story to her male companion. She says that it's just a myth: in reality, Yagawa was rescued the next morning, and forcing one's head out through the bottom would have been physically impossible because of the thick metal rods. The woman's companion teasingly tries to flip her hair back to see her ears. She clamps her hands over them and yells at him to stop.
