Junji Ito

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A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

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.

Works created by Junji Ito include:
Junji Ito provides examples of the following tropes:
  • Adult Fear
    • The climax of "Venus in the Blind Spot". After being briefly committed for being found in the part and shouting about aliens, the protagonist realizes that it's not aliens because he hears Mariko's father has been taken in for questioning by the police after he's discharged. He realizes this must have something to do with Mariko and runs to her house, just in time to see his UFO member friends kidnapping her to prove she's an alien. She ends up beaten to death, and the protagonist is knocked out as he tries to reason with them..
    • "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...but then he vanishes one day, and the police can't find any leads. The woman starts abusing her child, who looks like her husband when he was a boy. In the end, she dresses as her childhood self, having completely snapped, and drags her son to the park at night as he begs her to stop pulling his ears. One can hope a passersby stops her before she starts playing the same "pranks" on her innocent boy
  • And I Must Scream: Many of his endings count as this. Some highlights:
    • In "The Earthbound", the afflicted victims start turning into stone, while remaining conscious. Any attempts to dislodge them will cause their limbs to break off like twigs. While Minoru's mother and Asano massage his limbs as they start to feel it happening, they can't stop his body from turning into stone though Minoru blurts out that he deserves this because he killed his dog in a fit of anger.
  • 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. On the night when his sentence is carried out, the "ghost" stops appearing.
  • Author Appeal: Hair and obsessions with beauty often appear in his works.
  • Bad Humor Truck: Ice Cream Bus. You are what you eat...
  • 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. Compare Koichi (the balding man) on this page to a couple of pages later. Regaining one's sanity apparently makes you look a few years younger.
    • Inverted in Dying Young. Girls catch a disease which makes them extraordinarily pretty, but kills them soon after. A rumor is spread that killing another girl on a certain date will stave off death.
    • Downright subverted in Army of One (the short story at the end of Hellstar Remina), where the protagonist's crush was revealed to have stitched her parents together. Whether she became afflicted with the sewing madness by her loneliness and despair, or was one of the parties responsible for the incidents, is left unanswered.
    • Averted in Ice Cream Bus: The bus looks normal and the driver is handsome, but children are slowly turned into ice cream after they ride the bus.
  • 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, after the boy is killed and buried, they make a hive around the boy's head and start tending to him.
  • 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. When you kill her, each part becomes a new Tomie. You get to watch her body slowly reform over the course of weeks. Also, the only way to kill Tomie is to burn her entirely. Any parts left are still alive and capable of speech!
  • 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 and his potential son.
  • 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: A subversion in My Dear Ancestors. Risa's amnesia was caused by her seeing the scalps and brains of every member of Shuichi's family grafted to his father's head. The end implies that each one still actively thinks.
  • Humanoid Abomination
  • I Ate What?
  • I'm a Humanitarian: Soichi's potential son.
    • Also all the customers at the Greasy Restaraunt, after Yui and her father kill her brother.
    • A weird subversion in Anything But A Ghost. Misaki doesn't eat people...she eats ghosts. And they bleed.
  • 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. Eventually, they turn to stone.
  • 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 because asking for his permission to marry is the only way that he can see his daughter's spirit.
  • 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: 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 calling on a surgeon to perform surgery at night on a random man drugged with wine, then dumping them in the park where they will think they were abducted by aliens, the police are going to notice a pattern, especially if they can attest they were all having dinner with the same guy the night before. Mariko's father is questioned for the trend, and soon regrets the scheme because all of his victims tear his daughter apart in an attempt to show how much they "love" her and prove that she's an alien.
    • "The Earthbound": Asano is traumatized, moving from apartment to apartment, because a mysterious assailant raped her. As a result of the PTSD, she's jittery at home. Thanks to the Earthbound affliction, her assailant is punished. You think this would be the end of it? Nope; Asano finds out that her rapist was the director in charge of the volunteers, and her boss. He also became Earthbound in her apartment, where she finds out later he murdered a woman. Asano ends the story moving to another apartment, more traumatized than before.
  • 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 Mariko's father surgically inserts capsules into the UFO members' brains that would ensure they would block his daughter from view was so that no guy would ever get close enough to hurt her. 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. They kidnap her when the police take her father in for questioning, knock out the Only Sane Man who tries to tell them Mariko is obviously human, and accidentally kill her while trying to show their "love". We get a Downer Ending where the boys involved in the kidnapping are arrested for murder, and Mariko's father is also incarcerated for his ethically wrong surgeries. All he can do in prison is cry Tears of Remorse and beg Mariko's spirit for forgiveness because he engineered the situation he was trying to prevent.
  • 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 they actually escape and find their happy ending.
  • 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 his psycho mom by dissolving her skin suit with acid, dooming her to eventually mummify.
  • 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. It fails. When the counterpart's arm comes out of Yuuji's mouth, Mari finds herself being dragged in by the hand as he is turned inside out. Rather than try to free herself, she allows herself to be pulled in so she can stay with him.
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