Junji Ito is a horror mangaka (manga artist) from Nakatsugawa, Japan. His career began in the mid-80s.
Ito’s stories often involve themes of love, familial pressure, and supernatural forces to create a sense of dread in his audiences. The characters are often helpless in the face of overwhelming supernatural forces and hordes of brainwashed people.
CAREER LIFE
Junji Ito understands phobias, existential anxieties, and the terror of the unknown better than any other horror writer, combining a deft artist’s eye with a boundless and terrifying imagination.
He is Japan’s most successful and lauded horror writer. What makes Ito unique in the horror world is that he isn’t a novelist or a short story writer in the traditional sense; he’s a mangaka. His horror stories, both short and long, are all written and drawn with a surreal, off-kilter, otherworldly eeriness.
He became really famous after ‘Tomie’ – a series of stories about a young woman who defies death and ageing. ‘Tomie’ was immensely successful in Japan, running for 13 years and spawning nine feature-length movies.
Tomie proved to be the beginning of a phenomenal career as Junji Ito steadily made a greater and greater name for himself as the king of terror, not only in Japan but across the world.
STYLE, THEMES, AND INFLUENCE
Junji Ito’s largest influences in the world of art include Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino, as well as legendary American writer and creator of the cosmic horror genre, H.P. Lovecraft.
What sets Ito apart from other horror writers is a one-two punch: his ideas and his execution. Ito is a master of body horror, of suspense, and of otherworldly supernatural wrongness. His stories often begin in normality, descend into madness of a supernatural, monstrous kind, and are never resolved, leaving the shivers running up and down your spine long after the story ends.
If you want to get a glimpse of Junji Ito’s horror, you might want to check 3 of his best short stories for starters:
THE HANGING BALLOONS
As a story, “The Hanging Balloons” centers around the suicide of a teenage Japanese idol named Terumi Fujino and the domino effect this has on teen suicides all across the country.
THE ENIGMA OF AMIGARA FAULT
This might be his most psychological story. The tale follows Owaki and Yoshida who, like many others, have been drawn to an unnamed prefecture of Japan after a fault is discovered on Amigara Mountain. The peculiar site is filled with countless human-shaped holes in the rock face that have been revealed due to a recent earthquake. This is a terror masterpiece that relies on mystery and intrigue.
THE LONG DREAM
The Long Dream tells the story of a man in a hospital bed who lives years, sometimes entire lives – every time he sleeps. When he wakes up, the time he spent in the dream is worn on his skin and his body slowly degrades and morphs into something alien and frightening.
