Junji Ito
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Junji Ito (伊藤 潤二 Itō Junji, July, 1963 - ) is an author of Japanese horror manga.
Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1963, he was inspired from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's comics and thus took an interest in drawing horror comics himself. Nevertheless, upon graduation he trained as a dental technician, and until the early 1990s he juggled his dental career with his increasingly successful hobby — even after being selected as the winner of the prestigious Umezu prize for horror manga.
Ito's comics are sometimes gory, but humorous and often very original. His stories are typically about people whose jealousy and obsessions drive them to gruesome ends, only to bring them back to in mangled form to finish off the remaining protagonists.
The most common obsessions are with beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, especially in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections. For example: A girl's hair rebels against being cut off and runs off with her head; Girls deliberately catch a disease that makes them beautiful but then murder each other; a women treats her skin with lotion so she can take it off and look at her muscles, but the skin dissolves and she tries to steal her sister's skin, etc.
Ito's universe is also very 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.
His longest work, the three-volume Uzumaki, is about a town's obsession with spirals: people become variously fascinated with, terrified of, and consumed by the countless occurrences of the spiral in nature. Apart from the ghastly, convincingly-drawn deaths, the book projects an effective atmosphere of creeping fear as the town's inhabitants become less and less human, and more and more bizarre things begin to happen.
Before Uzumaki, Ito was best known for Tomie, a comic series about a beautiful, teasing and eternally youthful high school girl who inspires her stricken admirers to murder each other in fits of jealous rage. Eventually, unable to cope with her coy flirtation and their desire to possess Tomie completely, they are inevitably compelled to kill her — only to discover that, regardless of the method they chose to dispose of her body, her body will always regenerate.
In 1998, during the horror boom that followed the success of Ringu, Tomie was adapted into a movie. Since Tomie, many of his works have been adapted for TV and the cinema.
Ito's latest comic series is レミナ地獄星 (Hellstar Remina), published in Big Comic Spirits' monthly Casual. He is also publishing a series of unrelated short stories in Nemuki, starting with the February 2005 issue, the first of which is 合鏡谷にて (At the Valley of the Facing Mirrors).
Bibliography
Filmography
- Tomie
- Tomie Replay
- Tomie: Rebirth
- Tomie: Forbidden Fruit
- Tomie: Another Face
- Uzumaki
- Kakashi (Scarecrow)
- Lovesick Dead
- Nagai Yume (The Long Dream)
- Oshikiri
External links
- English Language Fan Site (http://junjiito.mutagene.net/)
- Japanese Language Fan Site (http://village.infoweb.ne.jp/~fwhs0357/ito/)ja:伊藤潤二