Junji Ito is widely regarded as Japan's most successful and acclaimed horror writer, born in 1963 in the Gifu Prefecture. However, Ito is not a traditional writer of short stories or novels, but rather a mangaka, creating his unique brand of horror through drawn and written stories. His work is characterized by an off-kilter, surreal, and otherworldly eeriness that sets him apart from other horror writers.
Ito's interest in horror manga began in his youth, inspired by his older sister's drawings and the works of Kazuo Umezu. Despite his passion for drawing, Ito trained as a dental technician after graduation. He balanced his dental career with his hobby until the early 1990s, when his success as a horror mangaka grew. Ito's work often features common obsessions such as beauty, long hair, and beautiful girls, which are explored in his Tomie and Flesh-Colored Horror comic collections.
In Ito's universe, his characters often become victims of malevolent and unnatural circumstances for no discernible reason or are punished disproportionately for minor infractions against an unknown and incomprehensible natural order. His longest work, Uzumaki, is a three-volume series about a town's obsession with spirals. The book is known for its ghastly and convincingly drawn deaths, as well as its effective atmosphere of creeping fear.
Before Uzumaki, Ito was best known for his Tomie 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. Ito's works have been adapted for TV and the cinema, with Tomie being adapted into a movie in 1998 during the horror boom that followed the success of Ringu.