Junji Ito is a Japanese horrormangaka. Some of his most notable works include Tomie, a series chronicling an immortal girl who drives her stricken admirers to madness, Uzumaki, a three-volume series about a town obsessed with spirals, and Gyo, a two-volume story where fish are controlled by a strain of sentient bacteria called "the death stench." His other works are Itou Junji Kyoufu Manga Collection, a collection of different short stories including a series of stories named Souichi's Journal of Delights, and , a self-parody about him and his wife living in a house with two cats.
Life and career
Junji Itō was born on 31 July 1963 in Sakashita, now a part of Nakatsugawa, Gifu. He began his experience in the horror world at a very young age; his two older sisters would read Kazuo Umezu and Shinichi Koga in magazines, and consequently, he began reading them too. He grew up in the countryside, in a small city next to Nagano. In the house where he lived the bathroom was at the end of an underground tunnel, where there were spider crickets, such experiences were later reflected in his works. Itō first began writing and drawing manga as a hobby while working as a dental technician in around 1984. In 1987, he submitted a short story to Gekkan Halloween that won an honorable mention in the Kazuo Umezu Prize. This story was later serialized as Tomie. Film directorGuillermo del Toro cited on his official Twitter account that Ito was originally a collaborator for the video game Silent Hills, of which both Del Toro and game designerHideo Kojima were the main directors. However, a year after its announcement, the project was canceled by Konami, the IP's owner. Itō and Del Toro would later lend their likenesses to Kojima's next project, Death Stranding. In 2019, Ito received an Eisner Award for his manga adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Personal life
In 2006, Junji married Ishiguro Ayako, a picture book artist. As of 2013, they have two children.
Inspiration and themes
In addition to Kazuo Umezu, Itō has cited Hideshi Hino, Shinichi Koga, Yasutaka Tsutsui, and H.P. Lovecraft as being major influences on his work. The universe Itō depicts is cruel and capricious; his characters often find themselves victims of malevolent unnatural circumstances for no discernible reason or punished out of proportion for minor infractions against an unknown and incomprehensible natural order. Some of the recurring themes of Itō's work include jealousy, envy, body horror, seemingly ordinary characters who begin to act out of irrational compulsion, the breakdown of society, deep-sea organisms, and the inevitability of one's demise, all displayed through a realistic and simple design, which emphasizes the contrast between beauty and death. The events narrated are unpredictable and violent, and arise from normal situations. Tomie was inspired by the death of one of his classmates, he felt strange that a boy he knew suddenly disappeared from the world and expected him to show up again, and that’s how he came up with the idea of a girl who is supposed to have died but then just shows up as if nothing had happened. Gyo was influenced by his anti-war feelings, developed when he was a child, due to his parents' tragic and frightening war stories. “The Hanging Balloons” was also based on a childhood dream.
