History Creator / JunjiIto

* SomethingCompletelyDifferent:
** "Bullied" has no overtly supernatural elements, no gore or deaths, and very few outright NightmareFace moments. It's more or less grounded in reality in comparison to most of his stories, but that doesn't make [[AdultFear its ending]] [[AbusiveParent any less disturbing]].
** His cat diary counts too, of course, as it's an autobiographical tale of his two cats, just told in his usual style.

* ;;Lovesickness'' (collects the ''Manga/{{Lovesickness}}'' series and other stories)

* ''Manga/{{Lovesickness}}'' (collects the ''Lovesickness'' series and other stories)

** ''{{Manga/Tomie}}''
** ''{{Manga/Uzumaki}}''
** ''Manga/{{Gyo}}''
*** "Manga/TheEnigmaOfAmigaraFault" (bonus short story printed with ''Gyo'')

* DaddysGirl: Riko in "Gentle Goodbye" is probably the best example. Miho in "Heart of a Father" is one until her father starts turning against her. Also Mizusu from "Approval", [[spoiler: whose father lies and uses a man for years just to be able to see her spirit.]]
* DarkerAndEdgier: His adaptation of Edogawa Ranpo's "The Human Chair", which is about an author reading a letter that gradually reveals that the man who wrote it is a stalker who's been concealing himself inside of her sofa. In the original story, the twist is that [[spoiler:there never was a man in the sofa and it's a story he's written for her to critique]]. In Ito's version? Nope, he's really in there.

* DudeLooksLikeALady: The only difference between Ito's male and female protagonists, appearance wise, is that the guys ''sometimes'' have a longer face than the girls. This is seemingly addressed in his post-return works (''{{Manga/Fragments of Horror}}'' onward), with his male leads having more variety and realism in their facial designs.

* FlatEarthAtheist: The protagonist of "Ghost Heights Management Association" is in an apartment complex full of monsters and the undead, but takes nearly until the end of the one-shot to realize it, even though it's obvious by the second page. Why? He doesn't believe in ghosts.

** The dialogue in the car ride at the beginning of "Layers of Fear" hints at the bizarre physical and psychological aspects of the sisters' unusual conditions.
*** Later, the MRI image of Reimi's structure [[spoiler:shows how stretched and distorted the inner layers' necks have become -- a subtle touch that the reader is likely to overlook the first time around, but one that indicates the flaw in Reimi's mother's plan long before the grotesque {{Reveal}}.]]

** Ito writes about a few of these, including the [[spoiler:Spiral City under Kurozu-cho]] in ''{{Manga/Uzumaki}}'' and the titular town in "The Blood Sickness of White Sands Village", [[spoiler: which has a subterranean heart pumping blood for all of its residents]].

* IdiotPlot[[invoked]]: He frequently does this intentionally, and plays it for horror. The people in his works quite often do not act, by any stretch of the imagination, like real people, and this quite frequently seals their doom and ruins any chances they might have to escape their gruesome fate. Sometimes their [[WeirdnessCensor Weirdness Censors]] go into total overdrive and cause TheCassandra to remain the Cassandra to people who have previously been direct witnesses to as many as ''[[Manga/{{Uzumaki}} three separate instances of the supernatural craziness he regularly warns people about]]'', and other times [[Manga/{{Remina}} they turn a young lady into an overnight celebrity over something as trivial as having a celestial body named after them]], and then, when that celestial body turns out to be a world-devouring EldritchAbomination, proceed to attempt to kill that woman [[InsaneTrollLogic in the insane belief that because it was named after her, killing her will somehow stop it]].

** [[spoiler:Souichi's potential son.]]
** [[spoiler:And the mother of that son, who eats someone in almost every story she's in.]]
** Also, all the customers at the restaurant for a time in "Greased", [[spoiler:after Yui and her father kill her brother.]]

** In "She is a Slow Walker" the protagonist [[spoiler: eats a ''zombie''. His girlfriend, in fact, whose motion was so slow he gave up trying to evade her and turned the tables, becoming a super-fast zombie afterward.]]

** In "Town With No Streets", Jack the Ripper is [[spoiler: stabbed to death by the aunt of a girl he was trying to murder.]]

** "Ghost Heights Management Association" also tends more toward black comedy, and the protagonist, Shougo Yanagida, seems pretty happy in the end. [[spoiler: Even if he does end up as an undead monster.]]

** Then there's "Memories of Real Poop", which turns out to be [[spoiler: an outright comedy with no horror or supernatural elements whatsoever]].

** In "Gravetown", the residents [[spoiler: transform into gravemarkers when they die.]] But when [[spoiler: the process is disturbed by moving the dead from the exact location of their death, they transform irregularly into hideous corpses riddled with jagged stone growths.]]
** Invoked in "The Earthbound", in which living people attach themselves to a certain spot, totally unmoving, [[spoiler: bound in place by guilt for crimes]]. Eventually, they harden to the point of being able to break like stone.

* TookALevelInBadass: Souichi is a plump, spoiled sadistic kid with awesome paranormal powers, usually employed to be little more than a pest and a nuisance with delusions of grandeur, always caught and punished by his family. However, in time [[spoiler: with his powers increasing, he becomes a sharply dressed businessman, the owner of an haunted mansion where he enacts his revenge over his cursed parents and siblings and keeps his cannibalistic son with a demoness]]. He's not actually any better at avoiding gruesome and humiliating consequences for forgetting that EvilIsNotAToy, though -- we're actually introduced to this version of Souichi ''before'' the child version, and those two stories kick off his long tradition of gruesome and humiliating defeats. But... [[spoiler:it turns out to be Souichi's dream as a child, and is yet another blow to him since it causes him to oversleep and miss out on playing outside.]]

* WriterOnBoard: The protagonist of "Ghost Heights Management Association" is a horror mangaka beleaguered by the stress of his work intersecting with his other duties and definitely isn't a means for Ito to rant about his own job. Ito himself has also been a member of a town council, [[WriteWhatYouKnow so that most definitely plays into it.]]
* WrongGenreSavvy: The mother in "Layers of Fear" discovers that [[spoiler: though it worked on the head, peeling off her daughter's nested layers does not exactly restore her perfectly to her two-year-body. So she decides "that one's ruined" and plans to take advantage of the family curse that caused it, peeling off her own layers to the age she gave birth to her daughter so she can have her again and be a mother of a needy baby once more. Insanity of the idea aside, the problem turns out to be that [[TearOffYourFace she didn't have the curse]].]]

* IAteWhat: These sometimes occur.

* NothingIsScarier: Mostly averted, as Junji Ito seems to enjoy depicting extreme BodyHorror. "The Seashore" from ''Mimi's Ghost Stories'', however, has a straight example. The photographs taken at the story's haunted beach are deeply disturbing, but some (depicting a waitress) are so frightening that the man who develops them destroys them immediately, leaving the reader to only imagine what they must have depicted.

'''Note''': Since the vast majority of Ito's works have not received official English translations, some stories are referred to with varying translated titles. On these works' pages, stories which have received official translations are listed with those titles.

* Licensed artwork for a number of other creator's works, including ''Franchise/{{Pokemon}}'', ''Franchise/DuelMasters'', and Film/PansLabyrinth.

* ItCameFromTheSink: In "The Groaning Drain", sisters Reina and Shinri and their cleaning-obsessed mother are at first only mildly annoyed when their drains start to clog. Reina is more concerned that her AbhorrentAdmirer Kari now knows where she lives (thanks to Shinri leading him to their house so their mother could insult him). Then the drains begin to leak a foul smell, and their pipes begin to moan. Shinri becomes convinced that Kari is causing the trouble, having crawled into their pipes to stalk them. Reina tells her that's ridiculous, as their pipes aren't more than a few centimeters wide, but [[spoiler: it turns out Shinri is right, Kari ''is'' in their pipes, having crushed his bones and deformed his skull to crawl into their drains]]. When Shinri forces Reina's hand into the shower drain to prove that there's nothing in there, [[spoiler: Reina is dragged into the pipes inch by inch as a shell-shocked Shinri watches in disbelief]].

* ''Venus in the Blind Spot'' (compiles various stories, as well as the bonus stories previously included with ''Gyo''.)

** "Heart of a Father". [[spoiler: Tsukasa is able to save Miho and her mother from Todo, who subsequently has a HeelRealization and commits suicide. Despite this, Miho's two brothers are still dead, and Todo's death is treated with a degree of sadness after we learn that his actions were due to his [[FreudianExcuse own crappy childhood]].]]

* DeadAllAlong: A twist that features in "A Deserter in the House", "Gentle Goodbye", and "Mold".

** "The Bully" has no overtly supernatural elements, no gore or deaths, and very few outright NightmareFace moments. It's more or less grounded in reality in comparison to most of his stories, but that doesn't make [[AdultFear its ending]] [[AbusiveParent any less disturbing]].

* WeaponWieldsYou: This is what the titular sword in "Sword of the Reanimator" does. The first thing it makes it new owner do is kill its old owner, which results in everyone it had previously reanimated dying again.

** In "Den of the Sleep Demon", Mari stays with her boyfriend, even risking destruction by his supernatural problem to do so.

* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism: Leans towards the cynical side, as one might expect from a horror writer, with most stories ending with the protagonist dead/transformed/insane/[[FateWorseThanDeath worse]]. That being said, he's not without idealism, and some stories do end with bittersweet/[[RayOfHopeEnding ray of hope]] endings, and even a straight Earn Your Happy Ending if you are '''EXTREMELY''' lucky. And for all the horrible things that happen to his protagonists, he is completely against the idea of nihilism and your actions being useless, as [[Manga/{{Remina}} ''Remina'''s]] aesop is essentially ''no matter how bleak things seem to be, so long as you are still alive there is hope for the future''

** In "Shiver", [[spoiler:Yuji witnesses Hideo succumb to the curse of the jade statue, being warned by him that the doctor is really a servant of the cure. Hideo's body is later found with the statue missing, but Rina seems to be finally free from the curse with her body apparenly back to normal.]]

** Creepy as they are, his stories often venture into this territory by virtue of their sheer over-the-top nature (for example: The entire premise of "Smashed" is about a tree that can literally squash you flat from across the globe). See also: ''Manga/{{Uzumaki}}'''s human jack-in-the-box and the continuing misadventures of [[TheChewToy Soichi Tsuji]].

** [[spoiler:Soichi's grandfather]] in "Coffin" and [[spoiler:Shibayama]] in "The Supernatural Transfer Student".

* ChildMage: Soichi, specializing in black magic and voodoo.

* CreepyChild: Often featured, with the most frequent case being Soichi.

** A rather literal case of a cat biting back. Soichi curses the family cat, Collon, and lives to regret it.

* EvilIsPetty: Soichi, to a truly breathtaking degree. At one point, he tries to kill his cousin for "stealing" his birthday.
* EvilIsNotAToy: What many folks learn when they try to bend the various malignant forces in the stories to their own purposes. In [[TheChewToy Soichi]]'s case, ''[[TooDumbToLive repeatedly]]''.

** [[spoiler:Soichi's potential son.]]

** Pretty much all of the works involving Soichi and the Tsujii family after "Mystery of the Haunted Mansion". The first story portrayed Soichi as an outright murderer with his family as a group of emaciated slaves, while the subsequent stories are mostly [[BlackComedy Black Comedies]] where nobody really dies and Soichi is more of a quirky neighborhood menace than an outright villain. Ito strongly averts the KarmaHoudini status most of his antagonists have with Souichi - following "Mystery of the Haunted Mansion", almost all of Souichi's schemes end with them backfiring gruesomely (and amusingly) on Souichi.

** Fuchi in "Fashion Model". Binzo Tsujii, her possible future son with Soichi, has even more of them.

* OnlySaneMan: A few of these, including Tsukiko in volume one of ''Tomie'' (and Yasuko in ''Tomie: Again''). Koichi or Michina usually take the role in Soichi stories.

* TookALevelInBadass: Souichi is a plump, spoiled sadistic kid with awesome paranormal powers, usually employed to be little more than a pest and a nuisance with delusions of grandeur, always caught and punished by his family. However, in time [[spoiler: with his powers increasing, he becomes a sharply dressed businessman, the owner of an haunted mansion where he enacts his revenge over his cursed parents and siblings and keeps his cannibalistic son with a demoness]]. He's not actually any better at avoiding gruesome and humiliating consequences for forgetting that EvilIsNotAToy, though -- we're actually introduced to this version of Souichi ''before'' the child version, and those two stories kick off his long tradition of gruesome and humiliating defeats. But... [[spoiler:it turns out to be Soichi's dream as a child, and is yet another blow to him since it causes him to oversleep and miss out on playing outside.]]

* YankTheDogsChain: If any chapter featuring Soichi seems to end with him happy and successful, it's the first part of a story that eventually ends badly for him--not that the reader usually ends up feeling any sympathy, though.

* AlwaysAChildToParent: The main conflict in "Layers of Fear" is about a woman desperate to have her daughter be a baby again and discovering means that she thinks will allow that to come true.

* ''Manga/LovesickDead'' (serial included in the ''Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection'')

* ''Lovesickness'' (collects the ''Lovesick Dead'' series and other stories)

** In ''Manga/LovesickDead'', the frighteningly influential Pretty Boy of the town crossroads is called that for a reason, but he does no good for anybody.

** ''Lovesick Dead'' invokes this, as it has two characters referred to as "bishounen" by others: the Intersection's Pretty Boy and [[spoiler:Ryuusuke, who becomes the "White-Clothed Pretty Boy"]].

** ''Lovesick Dead''. [[spoiler:Ryuusuke ultimately dies without protecting those he cares about or stopping the Intersection Pretty Boy, but the ending implies that he's actually become the Pretty Boy's [[EvilCounterpart Good Counterpart]] who can oppose him on his own level.]]

** ''Lovesick Dead'' is based around girls being compelled to commit suicide after getting advice from a mysterious boy at intersections.

** In "Ribs Woman", [[spoiler: the titular character is an unstable patient whose repeated rib-removal surgeries left her with a mass of wires in her chest, and then, ''later patients' removed ribs'', replacing those she had lost.]]

** In "Ribs Woman", the doctor who offers rib-removal cosmetic surgery mentions that the psychological well-being of patients is important, since unstable patients can take badly to the surgeries. Later, we see the case that likely prompted that speech.

** "Ribs Woman" features ill-advised plastic surgery procedures as the cause for its horrors.

** The Bizarre Hikizuri Siblings [[spoiler:subvert this. Narumi is set up as an innocent girl being put upon by her fiendish and bizarre siblings, and is pretty... but she turns out to be selfish, spiteful, manipulative, and incapable of really caring about others. The ''actual'' good one of the family is Hitoshi, who is corpse-like, with sunken, bag-plagued eyes, a slouch, and a drawn face with an overly long chin, resembling a somewhat more normal version of his older brother Kazuya. He does turn into a cute kid for about a panel when we first find this out, but after that he's right back to being just mildly less unsettling than most of his siblings.]]

** In one of the "Bizarre Hikizuri Siblings" stories, the badly abused and mistreated Hitoshi manages to get back at his siblings [[spoiler: by summoning the terrifying ectoplasmic form of their father from his mouth. He's completely oblivious.]]

* ImHavingSoulPains: The horrific entity in "Phantom Mansion" is ''literal'' phantom pain that likes to latch onto people.

** Then there's "A Shit to Remember", which turns out to be [[spoiler: an outright comedy with no horror or supernatural elements whatsoever]].

* ''Sensor'' (initially published as ''Travelogue of the Succubus'')

* ''Manga/TravelogueOfTheSuccubus'' (to be officially published as ''Sensor'')

* KarmaHoudini: The vast majority of Ito's horrors are untouchable, and the humanoid incarnations, pronoters, and carriers of them often suffer no consequences for their actions.

** In "Manga/TheEnigmaOfAmigaraFault", everyone who has a hole for them has a dream in which [[spoiler:the famed holes are shown to have been used as a pay of punishing unforgivable crimes in pre-history]], including the main character.

** ''In the Valley of Mirrors'', replacing the shattered mirrors in the titular valley gives the main character a vision of the past and how they shattered to begin with.