Awesome Art: Junji Ito's character designs might be recycled from story to story... but the man is not only prolific while using a realistic style, but he can draw the gruesome and weird like no one else. The same goes to the backgrounds, the amount of detail in the textures is insane.
Creepy Awesome: YES. His work is full of totally horrifying, bizarre, and mind-screwy characters and things, and that's exactly what fans love about it.
Growing the Beard: The first step was the development of Ito's art to be cleaner and more detailed, and thus, both more beautiful and frightening. The next was his increased commitment to long-form series which led to perhaps his best work, Uzumaki.
Memetic Mutation: "Dude! Let me in! I'm a fairy! Don't you believe in fairies?"Explanation An edited pair of panels from Ito's adaptation of Frankenstein, specifically the scene where the Creature taunts Victor after the deaths of Elizabeth and Alphonse. The tonal contrast between the grotesque, gothic imagery and the flippant dialogue resulted in the edit becoming a popular subject of parody online, usually swapping out Victor and the Creature with characters from other works.
Narm: Ito's stories are often meant to invoke very specific phobias, so if you don't have those fears, the concepts may instead look silly and hard to take seriously. Or just plain cool.
In the Animated Adaptation of Souchi stories, Souchi's classmates are canonically in elementary school. Unfortunately, the voice actors are all adults, making them sound like they're all in college. This makes the story even more funny, but not for the reasons Ito intended.
Some of the facial expressions are intended to be creepy... but sometimes they instead look hilarious.
Narm Charm: Many of his stories are incredibly over the top, but the artwork and writing manage to make them awesome. The man has a remarkable ability to take concepts that are utterly ludicrous on paper or sound like something out of a Dr. Seuss book (Evil ice cream! Fish on stilts! Being stalked by an angry balloon!) and make them terrifyingbeyond all reason.
"The Licking Woman" uses a horrible mutant tongue (which is actually a parasite that inhabits people's mouths) in conjunction with Orifice Invasion and Vomit Indiscretion Shot and it's just absolutely disgusting. Let's just say you might have trouble getting excited about kissing for a time after reading it.
The short story "Glyceride" (titled "Greased" in "Shiver") is absolutely disgusting.
Paranoia Fuel: Much of Junji Ito's work revolves around this, by taking everyday situations and mundane things and twisting them into something horrific. Uzumaki is arguably the biggest example. You'll never look at spirals the same way again.
Values Dissonance: “Whispering Woman” has the main character hire a woman named Mitsu help him with his daughter’s inability to function without help. Later in the story, Mitsu is becoming increasingly ragged and severely overworks herself, and the cause for both of these is because her boyfriend is physically abusive and steals all her money. When confronted about doing something, the main character comments that he shouldn’t interfere with her personal life, a typical view in Japan.
Woolseyism: Zig-zagged with different translations, with the older, arguably more well-known fan translations sometimes coming off as better or worse in parts than the later-released official ones. Notable aversions of the trope include the "hanging balloons" being called blimps for some reason in the official translation despite not being vehicles, and the metric known as "saturation levels" in "Greased"'s fan translation and the anime dub being called the less elegant "oil index" in the official manga translation. But though the official translations tend to lack in the translation of terms and small remarks, however, they usually do better in adjusting the flow and tone of conversations to feel more natural and casual.
