Junji Ito's perfect composure and modesty stand in sharp contrast with his crazed and bloodcurdling universe, populated by beautiful and naive young people, extravagant monsters, specters and disfigured bodies.
Now 59, he has been elegantly shaping his world since the mid-1980s. His unique figures and refined drawings sparingly colored in black ink are immediately recognizable and have made him an undisputed master of horror.
The artist's discretion is an early feature. "I was a rather dark teenager, the opposite of a party person," the "mangaka" (manga creator) told Le Monde on the eve of the Angoulême International Comics Festival (FIBD) which took place earlier this month and made him one of its special guests.
Some readers believe he impersonates some of his young male characters, many of them shy and withdrawn. Like the facetious Soichi, a pale and deranged child who sucks on nails, allegedly to fight against anemia, and spends his time tormenting those around him in a series of short stories written throughout the author's career:
"Soichi is a negative boy with a twisted mind. There is a bit of me in him. I was a child who was well-behaved and obedient at school. As soon as I got home, my twisted side came out. I have memories of being quite prankish with my family."
This touch of humor is precisely what keeps his short stories from becoming too spine-chilling. "Ito is rather classic and unprovocative, even though he draws gruesome things," Virginie Nebbia, a critic who specializes in the mangaka, said. "He is a master of a type of horror that is accessible to a wide audience, it is cathartic and entertaining."
'Strangeness of death'
For him, telling horror stories was always an obvious choice. Struck at a very young age by films like William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973) and Dario Argento's Suspiria (1977), Ito grew up in the rural province of Gifu, Japan. He did not escape the "boom in everything related to the occult, UFOs, telekinesis" originating from American pop culture that was very much in vogue in the 1970s and 1980s.
He was also influenced by the toshi densetsu, Japanese urban legends that flourished in the 1980s.
Yet the mangaka recalled his biggest inspiration came from a "visual shock" when he was around 4-5 years old and discovered his first manga: Mira Sensei, a frightening story his sister had bought. The story was by-lined Kazuo Umezu, the exuberant founder of horror manga.
In this comic, a terrifying mummy pretends to be a teacher in a school of nuns. "The contrast between this really grotesque mummy and the heroine, a very beautiful young girl, left a strong impression on me," Ito said.
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