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A distinctive style, much detail, and dramatic

sound effects at key moments to depict his

stories in manga.

J u n j i

I t o

Eisner Award for Lovesickness Manga

取 り つ か れ る こ と 社 社

会 会

J u n j i J a p a n e s e

崩 崩

壊、 壊、 I t o

H o r r o r

美 美

し し

さ、 さ、

H o r r o r

無 無

力 力

感、 感、

謎 謎

C o l l e c t i o n

m a n g a k a

a r t i s t

Tableof

Contents Junji Ito

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History Career Manga

上

Themes

Beauty Obsession Japanese Society

Known Works Tomie Gyo Uzumaki

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Other Works History Career Manga

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Junji Ito July 31, 1963

HISTORY His horror experiences began at a very young age and being influenced by his older sisters that read Umezu and Shinichi Koga in magazines. Growing up in the countryside where there were spider crickets would later be reflected in his works. At 4, Ito started creating comics, drawing inspiration from the stories he read in magazines.

CAREER Before becoming a dental technician in 1984, he kept drawing as a hobby but found it challenging to balance the two. In 1987, he submitted a short story to the Monthly Halloween and received an honorable mention in the Kazuo Umezu Prize, this story ran for 13 years and was later serialized as Tomie. Many of his works have been adapted into films such as Tomie and Uzumaki

MANGA His most well-known works include Tomie, a series about an immortal girl who drives her bewildered admirers insane; Uzumaki, a three-volume series about a town obsessed with spirals; Gyo, a two-volume tale about fish that are under the control of a sentient bacterial strain known as "the death stench."

BEAUTY

OBSESSION

In Ito's manga, different alignments are frequently denoted by physical characteristics. Characters who are both extremely attractive and unattractive are typically antagonistic and/or supernatural in some way; even without succumbing to magical corruption, persons with a more "regular" appearance, like the driver of the Ice Cream Bus, might serve as adversaries.

Many of Ito's works contain characters who at some time become irrationally obsessed with a thing, a different person, or a phenomenon. This might manifest as either a fascination with or an aversion to the subject; some stories even combine the two simultaneously.

CRITICISM OF JAPANESE SOCIETY Ito occasionally employs elements of Japanese culture, or society in general, as tale components, often portraying them negatively. Hellstar Remina, for example, might be interpreted as a satire on Japan's excessively exploitative pop idol culture, and The Town Without Streets' incessant invasions of privacy hint to the rise of the Internet and other techniques of tracking others. Ito is also renowned for being one of the few manga writers to confront Japan's war crimes during World war ii — "death stench" in Gyo is meant to be the product of Imperial Japan's horrific human experimentation.

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TOMIE

Tomie Kawakami is a mysterious, beautiful woman who acts like a succubus, holding an unknown ability to make any man fall in love with her to the point of obsession, driving their victims to murder anyone who stands in their way, including Tomie herself.

GYO The story follows Tadashi and his girlfriend Kaori, who are on vacation in Okinawa. Following a weird encounter with a fast-moving object while scuba diving near a shipwreck, the pair is threatened by an odorous fish with bizarre crab-like legs that walks on land.



UZUMAKI

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a high school student from Kurouzu-cho, a Japanese seashore town. Kirie and her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, learn that the spiral shape has cursed Kurouzu-cho. The curse infects the population of Kurouzu-bodies, cho's minds, and souls, generating a mass fixation with spirals.

SLUG GIRL O

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A short story about a girl named Yuuko who has been experiencing terrifying supernatural occurrences after her family discovers that slugs are congregating around their home. When Yuuko's friend Rie tries to figure out what's going on, she learns that Yuuko's tongue has turned into a slug. The last panels of the story show that the slug has totally overrun Yuuko's body, and is now using her head as a creepy shell to crawl across a neighboring tree.



CAT DIARY This is not a horror story. Or maybe it is – The book follows Junji Ito as he adjusts to living with cats and discovers that not only are cat people scary, but he also has no idea how to deal with kittens. AN autobiographical manga that draws on manga artist Junji Ito's personal experience with cats.

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SOICHI'S DIARY OF DELIGHTS R

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The story 'Souichi's Convenient Curse' is the first in the manga Souichi's Diary of Curses. The manga follows Souichi, a crazy fifth-grader who enjoys cursing and pranking not just his family but also his classmates. In this story, Souichi annoys his classmates with a variety of curses.

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二 ITŌ JUNJI "Comics utilize images, angles, and feelings that are hard to create in the real

world. I think it’s hard to reproduce the overall atmosphere of a comic into a

movie, because a film must use real actors and actresses that are not perfectly

matched with my original work." -Junji Ito, March 2006