Junji Ito



Junji Ito is one of the top leading mangakas in the horror genre, his most popular works being Uzumaki, Tomie and The Enigma of Amigara Fault. His Tomie series have been adapted into a series of movies and TV specials, eventually followed by a movie adaptation of Uzumaki. Netflix will release an anthology series based on his tales in 2023.

He used to also work as a dental technician until the early 1990s, which probably explains a couple of things about his work.


 * Black Paradox
 * The Enigma of Amigara Fault (short story)
 * Flesh-Colored Horror (compilation)
 * The Face Burglar
 * Falling (short story)
 * A manga adaptation of Frankenstein
 * Gyo
 * Hellstar Remina
 * Mimi's Ghost Stories (compilation/collaboration with Nakayama Ichiro)
 * Soichi's Diary of Delights
 * Tomie (anthology)
 * Uzumaki
 * Voices in the Dark (compilation)
 * A follow-up named New Voices in the Dark was also released.
 * Ito Junji no Neko Nikki


 * Adult Fear
 * The climax of "Venus in the Blind Spot"..
 * "The Earthbound". A mysterious disease afflicts adults and children alike. They have to spend time outside, frozen in place while posing in a specific spot. Minoru's mother is in tears as she begs him to come home.
 * "Bullied" starts and ends with this. The narrator is a woman who used to bully a childhood neighbor, to the point that a dog attacked him. She felt guilty about this, but met her victim as an adult. Rather than being mad at her, he invited her to tea, and they fell in love. She broke off her engagement with a previous fiance because of that chance meeting. It seems all is well...
 * And I Must Scream: Many of his endings count as this. Some highlights:
 * In "The Earthbound", the afflicted victims start While Minoru's mother and Asano massage his limbs as they start to feel it happening, they can't stop his body.
 * Astral Projection: Possible subversion in Deadman Calling. The "ghost" of a criminal sentenced to death visits the home of his only living victims every night, begging for forgiveness.
 * Author Appeal: Hair and obsessions with beauty often appear in his works.
 * Bad Humor Truck: Ice Cream Bus.
 * Beauty Equals Goodness: You can usually get a good idea of who's going to be a nice person/protagonist just by looking at them.
 * However, it is also equally obvious what the character is like if their "beauty" goes a tad over the top.
 * If a character's role in the story shifts at all, there's usually a corresponding shift in appearance.
 * Inverted in Dying Young.
 * Downright subverted in Army of One (the short story at the end of Hellstar Remina), where
 * Averted in Ice Cream Bus: The bus looks normal and the driver is handsome, but.
 * Bee-Bee Gun / Everything's Worse with Bees: The boy in Beehive who could control bees and used them to fend off hive robbers. Then,.
 * Beware of Hitch-Hiking Ghosts: Subverted to Hell and back in Anything but a Ghost.
 * Black Comedy: Creepy as they are, it soon becomes obvious that he's more interested in having fun with his stories than in treating them as matters of deadly seriousness. See also: Uzumaki's human jack-in-the-box and the continuing misadventures of Soichi Tsuji.
 * Body Horror: And how! His work essentially runs on this trope.
 * In Hell'o Dollies, Doll's disease is turning children into dolls. And that's before it gets worse.
 * To say nothing of Flesh-Colored Horror...when we see what Chikara's mother's idea of "beauty" is.
 * Uzumaki
 * The Enigma of Amigara Fault
 * Tomie runs on this.
 * The Chew Toy: Soichi Tsuji, the sinister, nail-eating villain of several short stories, tends to have his various evil schemes backfire on him in the most gruesome, humiliating manners possible, in marked contrast to the usual fate of an Ito antagonist.
 * Creepy Child: Especially Soichi
 * Death Glare: In the Valley of Mirrors
 * Downer Ending
 * Ear Worm: A particularly malevolent in-universe version serves as the supernatural menace of the day in 'Songs In The Dark'. Anyone who hears it can't get it out of their head, even with meds or headphones.
 * Eldritch Abomination
 * Evil Is Not a Toy: What many folks learn when they try to bend the various malignant forces in the stories to their own purposes. In Soichi's case, repeatedly.
 * Fan Disservice: If there's nudity or skimpy clothing in his works, don't expect it to be played for titillation.
 * For Want of a Nail: One short memoir comic showed that Junji Ito was asked to work on a manga version of mother!. He liked the idea and did concept art, but admits that with his current schedule, he'd have no time to make the deadline. With hindsight, he admits that he wasn't the right horror artist for the job and wouldn't have nailed the look.
 * Gross-Out Show
 * Hive Mind: Risa's amnesia was caused by her seeing
 * Humanoid Abomination
 * I Ate What?
 * I'm a Humanitarian:
 * Also all the customers at the Greasy Restaraunt,
 * A weird subversion in Anything But A Ghost. Misaki doesn't eat people...
 * Lighter and Softer: Neko Nikki compared to the rest of his works.
 * Living Statue: Inverted in The Earthbound, in which living people attach themselves to a certain spot, totally unmoving.
 * Monster Sob Story: To varying degrees. While the antagonists of his stories are often Complete Monsters or Eldritch Abominations or worse, there is the occasional antagonist who has more sympathetic motives.
 * For example, the father in Approval cruelly and repeatedly denies the hand of his daughter to a suitor.
 * Murderous Mannequin: One short story was about an artist who made headless mannequins (though his reason was for people to appreciate the body-language, not the face). Then his creations came to life, began killing people, and placing the victims' heads on their necks. Yeah.
 * Nightmare Face: See the page image up there? There are worse faces in most of his works.
 * The Adjacent Window. Hello, neighbor...
 * Nightmare Fetishist: Ito himself is a pretty clear example.
 * Only Six Faces: Particularly noticeable in his short stories. The character designs used for Kirie and Shuichi from Uzumaki appear all over the place with different hairstyles.
 * Over the Shoulder Murder Shot: [[media:Binjo_Tsuji_4918.jpg|This panel]].
 * Playing Against Type: Neko Nikki compared to the rest of his works.
 * Planet Eater
 * Posthumous Narration: If there's any good in the world.
 * Pragmatic Adaptation: See the list above? Yes, Junji Ito created a manga adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
 * Reality Ensues:
 * "Venus in the Blind Spot" has this. Turns out that if you have a habit of . Mariko's father is questioned for.
 * "The Earthbound": Asano is traumatized, moving from apartment to apartment, because . Thanks to the Earthbound affliction,.
 * Rule of Scary: Applied liberally, in much the same way as other writers would use the Rule of Cool.
 * Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: "Venus in the Blind Spot" ends this way, with tragic results. The reason why . Thanks to his actions, the UFO club members start to believe that Mariko is an alien because she vanishes every time they see her up close. . We get a Downer Ending where.
 * Self-Parody: Ito actually managed to draw a pet diary once . Needless to say, his fiancee wasn't amused when she became his signature scary woman with the Glowing Eyes of Doom.
 * Star-Crossed Lovers: Featured in one chapter of Uzumaki and in the short story In the Valley of Mirrors. The lovers in the former chapter fare better than the ones in the latter, given
 * Surreal Horror
 * The Dog Bites Back: A rather literal case of a cat biting back. Soichi curses the family cat, Colin, and lives to regret it.
 * Chikara from Flesh Coloured Horror get's back at
 * The Stars Are Going Out
 * Toilet Humor: One of his stories is titled A Shit to Remember. You can pretty much guess what it's going to be about.
 * World of Symbolism: Many of the reveals only make sense when taken metaphorically.
 * You Are Worth Hell: In Den of the Sleep Demon, Mari's boyfriend Yuuji risks being turned inside out by a dream version of himself every time he falls asleep. When he finally passes out, Mari duct tapes her hand to his, hoping that will keep him anchored and that his counterpart will not be able to crawl out of his mouth.