Top 5 Favorite Junji Ito Stories

About two years ago my brother stumbled across a Japanese horror author named Junji Ito and a story he had created called "Uzumaki." That was just the start of our journey through Junji Ito's horror repertoire, which is extensive, far-reaching, and to this point we've caught up on everything he has put out with his next releases already pre-ordered. His stories are genuinely creepy, with body horror unlike anything I've seen in other media, and art images that still creep into my mind when I'm trying to fall asleep at night. Many of his stories also carry deeper meanings and ideas to think about afterwards, with many being extremely thought provoking, and overall these next five stories I'm going to talk about have been the tales that stuck with me the most!

Honorable mention: Deserter

What really got me about this story was the ending, the final image of the tale, in which the titular Deserter appears after the truth about his death has come out. The rest of the tale was an interesting read, with the deserter's history with the family and the way they treated him because of it. Like I mentioned though, the finale is what really gripped me. After the family learn the truth, that he has been death for years, he suddenly appears around the corner, walking into the room unannounced, a gaunt, empty expression on his face. I can only imagine what occurred next, and chills are what I get. 

Honorable mention 2: Black Bird

The next honorable mention that I have to talk about is Black Bird, a grotesque story whose twist is something I still think about every so often, especially while out hiking with my brothers. A man is injured and stranded in the mountainside, but each night a tall woman in black appears to him and feeds him meat to help him survive until he is eventually rescued. Even still, the woman appears in his hospital room, feeding him meat which turns out to be human remains. Ultimately, years later, he is found dead and devoured, with the implication being that the woman in black had feasted on him, and travelled back in time to feed him his own flesh to keep him alive in the past. There was no way to avoid her, to keep her away, and she always came, with fate seeming to be locked in place from the moment she first appeared. 

5. The Enigma of Amigara Fault

One of the instances of body horror in Junji Ito's art that really unnerved me when I saw it was the finale of The Enigma of Amigara Fault. A mountainside reveals odd openings in the cliffside that appear like human silhouettes, and hoards of folks are drawn to openings that they believe are "theirs." People begin to slip into these holes, vanishing within as they descend into the mountainside, unseen or heard from again. On the other side of the mountain weeks later there are similar openings found; however, they are distorted, freakish silhouettes barely able to be described as human. Surveyors hear noises from within one of these holes, and looking inside they see a being warped by the tight tunnel that they once fit into perfectly, still inching through the tunnel which has warped them into something unrecognizable. There can be a lot said about humans forcing us into roles which seem to fit us, only to wind up becoming something very distant from what we once were, and the final image of this tale hammers in that point well.

4. The Window Next Door

My first exposure to this was actually one of the anthology anime series that covers Junji Ito's works. I am not exaggerating when I say that I had trouble falling asleep that night. The woman herself who resides in the window next door is creepy enough already, but something I had been used to with Ito's work. It was the scenario they were placed in, the eerie, unsettling voice as she called to the boy the story revolved around, and the idea that in the dead of the night this mysterious person would try to enter your bedroom when we're asleep, when it's dark, when we're at the most vulnerable. When I finally got to the story in manga form I couldn't not read the woman's dialogue in the voice the anime had chosen for her, and while I don't even have another house directly beside my bedroom window I still that first night kept glancing at my window imagining the woman on the other side.

3. The Long Dream

This one wasn't so much scary on its own as it was just purely compelling. Dreams have been something I've always found myself entranced by, and two of the scariest ideas about dreams were presented in The Long Dream. One is a dream where you life a whole life believing it to be real only to wake up and realize it was just a dream, and the other being that you find yourself in a never ending dream. That was what the main character of Junji Ito's tale this time experienced, as each night presented a new dream world that lasted longer, and he experienced as realistically as we experience the real world. He would dream an entire lifetime where a nurse he saw for a moment was his wife, only to wake up and it turn out to be a dream and that she was a stranger to him. He would dream entire worlds where he woke up speaking different dialects and languages. Ultimately, he would dream for so long that the bodily changes he experienced in the dream that spanned eons reflected in the real world as he became less than human. I sit here writing this wondering the scary possibility that this could all be a dream too, that I might wake up from any second, and realize my life wasn't what I've thought it was...

2. Fashion Model

The unsettling character of Fuchi has reappeared several times over Junji Ito's works, owing to this character's popularity amongst readers, and rightfully so for being such a horrifying entity in his world. The Fashion Model storyline is the first she appears in, and she certainly looks her mark not just for her initially disturbing appearance, but the series of events that follow. It is never made clear how exactly she established herself in the fashion world, and it is made excessively clear that she is not quite human with her unsettling maw of fangs. I need to contemplate more what the story could stand for when it comes to the beauty industry, but whatever it stands for Junji Ito decided to introduce to us one of his scariest creations whom I am both thrilled and horrified to see crop up in his writing every so often. I think one of the things about this character that chills me the most is how openly present she is in regular day to day life. This isn't a spirit in some small village in the mountain, this is a woman who appears in fashion magazines, who models for beauty companies, someone is very public, meaning that you could run across her even living in a big city or avoiding the usual horror conventions. 

1. Uzumaki

Topping off this list is what is arguably his most popular and far-reaching publication. The spiral-obsessed tale of Uzumaki is one that kept me hooked chapter after chapter, each new body-horror panel more unnerving than the last, and this fantastic manga was the one that got me and my brother going after every other publication of Junji Ito's that we could find. The town in the story is at first plagued by small events related to spirals, one man obsessed with it who spirals himself into death, spirals appearing in odd places in town such as manifesting through girls' hair, ultimately the town descends into abstract horror, unexplainable events, unfathomable occurrences. People turn into slugs, and are then eaten by others who crawl inside the shells. The buildings are demolished, and instead rebuilt as shacks forming a spiral in the town's land, all leading to a mysterious ending which makes us wonder what exactly was behind everything that had happened. Every image from this manga is iconic, and with Uzumaki there was no better Junji Ito story for me to start my discovery of this author with.