Junji Ito smiles softly, then draws your worst nightmare: The duality of a gentle man and the horrors he creates

Time of India

24-05-2025

Images via Twitter and Crunchyroll
You'd never guess it from his smile. He looks like someone who might quietly offer you a cup of tea, not someone responsible for drawing a girl whose face stretches into an eternal spiral.
And yet, Junji Ito is both.
A man of kindness, precision, and quiet charm. And the architect of nightmares.
The soft-spoken master who draws with dread
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Junji Ito was born in 1963 in Nakatsugawa, a small town in Japan with misty hills and silent tunnels. He grew up in a traditional wooden rowhouse. His childhood wasn't haunted by ghosts, but by crickets — swarms of them in the underground bathroom, loud and alive. That's where it began. Not the drawing, but the listening.
The noticing. The fear.
By day, he trained to be a dental technician. But by night, he scribbled horror into sketchbooks, drawing monsters with more anatomy than most people care to know. It helped that he was trained to know every tooth, every tendon. The creatures he imagined were not unreal — they were anatomically probable.
Ito submitted
Tomie
, a story about a girl so beautiful she drove men to madness, to a magazine competition in 1986.
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It won. And then she multiplied — literally. In the story, her severed limbs grew back into new versions of herself. It was grotesque. But it was also about grief. Tomie came from Ito's own brush with death — the sudden loss of a classmate, and the strange, quiet hope that maybe, impossibly, they'd walk through the door the next morning like nothing had happened.
His horror works because it begins in the ordinary
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No one starts screaming on page one. Ito always starts with silence.
A town. A school. A couple brushing their teeth. Then, he starts to twist the world.
In
Uzumaki
, people begin to notice spirals. In the air. In their hair. In their bodies. It's absurd. Until it's not. A man becomes a human corkscrew. A girl turns into a spiral-shaped shell. A baby is born with a whirlpool in its forehead. The logic unspools like thread in the dark — irrational, yet inevitable.
Ito's real genius isn't the jump scare.
It's the slow crawl of dread. The ache in your stomach when a normal scene won't end. The panel that lingers one beat too long. His horror isn't fast. It's patient. And that's what makes it unbearable.
His monsters are drawn with love
Look closer at his panels — not just the monsters, but the ink. The details are clinical, almost loving. Hair strands drawn one by one. Wrinkles rendered with surgical care. Even his gore is beautiful in a way that should make you feel guilty for staring.
He once used a toothbrush dipped in ink to draw the slime on a giant slug-tongue. That's commitment. That's also revulsion, made intimate.
What frightens him? War. Insects. Social pressure. Toilets. Yes, really. The bathroom in his childhood home was down a tunnel and filled with bugs. You feel it in stories like
The Liminal Zone
— stories where horror isn't far away. It's inside the home. Or worse, inside the body.
The gentle maestro behind manga's most terrifying visions
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Junji Ito the man is kind, almost bashful.
He's a cat dad. He laughs often. His interviews are polite, self-deprecating. There's no darkness behind the eyes.
And yet.
His stories have been banned, adapted, parodied. They've become viral memes, Hello Kitty collabs, T-shirt graphics. But no matter the form — be it plush doll or panel — his stories retain something terrible underneath. A quiet truth. That fear doesn't need fangs. It needs familiarity. It needs to look like something you've seen before. A shadow. A crack. A smile that stretches a bit too wide.
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