BODY: When Junji Ito calls something "abnormal," he means it as the highest compliment. The horror manga legend β recently inducted into the U.S. Eisner Awards Hall of Fame, comics' equivalent of the Academy Awards β has spent four decades turning the uncanny into art, and he insists the strangeness is the point.
In a new interview, Ito explained that his creative engine runs on the same "γ―γ―γ―γ―ζ" (wakuwaku-kan, a fluttering excitement) he felt as a child encountering things he couldn't explain. Spiral staircases, holes in walls, the texture of hair β ordinary objects become unbearable once Ito turns his pen on them. He says he is still chasing the same chill he felt reading Kazuo Umezz as a boy.
Ito also spoke admiringly of the younger generation of manga artists who cite him as an influence, singling out Tatsuki Fujimoto (Chainsaw Man) and Gege Akutami (Jujutsu Kaisen). Of Fujimoto in particular, Ito praised an instinct for the grotesque that feels genuinely abnormal rather than performative β a rare quality, he suggests, in an industry that often rewards polish over weirdness.
His advice to creators is almost contrarian: don't sand down the strange parts. The discomfort a reader feels is not a bug in the work but the work itself. For Ito, "normal" horror has already been done; what's left is the territory most people would rather not enter.
The insider take
From Tokyo, this interview lands at an interesting moment. Ito has quietly become Japan's most exported horror brand β his Netflix anthology, gallery shows in Paris and L.A., and steady English translations through Viz have made him a name that Western readers know before they know the genre he comes from. Meanwhile, Fujimoto and Akutami represent a generation of mangaka who grew up reading Ito in Nemuki and Big Comic Spirits, and their willingness to embrace body horror in mainstream ShΕnen Jump titles is, in many ways, Ito's aesthetic finally going pop.
Originally reported by γ―γ¦γͺγγγ―γγΌγ― (Japanese).