Junji Ito, aka the king of body horror, has created many iconic stories within the horror genre. Story after story, he manages to outdo himself each time, with every story getting more unbelievable and disturbing than the last. Even then, there are a few gems that he has created that sticks with every person reading them, and I have no problem naming them for you!

Black Bird

Everyone knows how mother birds work, right? They feed their children by chewing the food in their mouths and throwing it up into their babies’ mouths. What if I told you that you were injured and defenseless, and there was a strange woman following you around, chewing weird meat in her mouths and force-feeding it to you through a kiss? Well, this story answers that question. In Black Bird, traveler Moriguchi has an accident that breaks his leg in the middle of the woods, causing him to spend an entire month without food. Kume, a man strolling by, finds him and rushes him to a nearby hospital. Even after being safe now, Moriguchi pleads with Kume to stay with him, and the mystery of how Moriguchi managed to survive a whole month without food begins to unravel itself.

Dissolving Classroom

What happens when you put a devil-worshiping teenage boy and his evil little sister together? A lot of things, and all of them horrific and terrible for the people around them. In Dissolving Classroom, we follow Keiko as she befriends the new kid, Yuma. Everyone that crosses paths with Yuma is met with a barrage of apologies from him, and this sparks the beginning of the end for a lot of people. After chance encounters and accidents, a mysterious illness breaks out in the town, and there’s only two kids that could be responsible for it….

Whispering Woman

Whispering Woman follows Mayumi, a young girl living with a mental illness after her mother’s death that requires her to always be given strict instructions for every waking moment of her life. If she doesn’t have someone there to guide her and make her decisions for her, she becomes incapable of doing anything, so her father hires helper after helper with no luck. Suddenly, a young, mysterious woman named Mistu takes his job offer, and follows Mayumi everywhere and does her job well despite the toll it takes on her physical health. After awhile, we begin to see why Mitsu took this incredibly demanding job, and why she loved what she did at this job so much.

Long Dream

Can you imagine living an entire lifetime, making friends and family, building a steady career and a happy life only to realize that it’s all just a dream? Well, Long Dream follows a young woman named Mami, who is awaiting brain surgery at a hospital. After awhile, she gets a visit by a sickly man in the middle of the night, and despite being terrified, is told that he’s just another patient. This patient, Tetsuro, has been having extremely long dreams, where they last for about a year, even if he’s only been asleep for a single night. With time, his dreams get longer and longer, and he begins to lose touch with reality. The doctors treating him research his condition and try to find a solution, but what if it’s already too late?

Glyceride

Glyceride is probably one of Junji Ito’s most visually disgusting stories, and for a good reason. Throughout the story, we follow Yui, a young girl who lives with her father and brother above their family barbeque restaurant. Because of the shop being covered head to toe in grease, the grease ends up affecting their home, causing it to become extremely greasy and oily. Yui is tormented daily by her violent, abusive brother, and throughout his teen years, he begins drinking oil. One day, in a fit of rage, he takes things a little too far…

The Hanging Balloons

Kazuko, a teenage girl, is trapped in her own house and is quickly starving, but can’t leave or she’ll be killed. A creature outside her home tries to lure her out, and we soon learn how things became this desperate. A month prior, Kazuko’s best friend, Terumi, a celebrity, committed suicide by hanging herself from a telephone wire. Her fans, friends, and boyfriend are devastated by her death, and soon after, there begin to be copycat suicides among her fans. Like clockwork, people begin seeing a “ghost” of Terumi’s head floating in the town, and when her boyfriend, Shiroishi, catches a glimpse of it himself, things begin to get weird…

Earthbound

Like in most of Junji Ito’s stories, things are normal, and then almost immediately, they aren’t anymore. People suddenly begin to pose and freeze in certain places, unable to move their bodies. With the numbers of these weird cases increasing by the day, Asano, a volunteer at a company working to help these people, starts investigating what could be the cause of this odd behavior. Asano thinks that these people are stuck in places that they have an emotional attachment to, but the truth of it all is much darker than she thought.

Hellstar Remina

If you’re into astronomy, this is the story for you! Hellstar Remina starts off with a young girl, Remina, being crucified, with people calling for her death as destruction rains down around her. We’re soon taken back to what caused this outrage and violence in the first place. Remina’s father, Oguro, wins an award for discovering a new planet, and proudly names it after his daughter. Soon after, he begins to realize that whenever the planet Remina comes near any stars or planets, they disappear. At the same time, Remina begins to get a lot of attention and fame from the planet named after her, and propels into stardom. This turns into a huge problem, as people are informed that the planet Remina is coming straight for Earth, and has already eaten many planets on its way. With this amount of frustration and stress, everyone gets desperate, and decide to take it out on the people connected to the planet… Remina and her father.

Tomie

If you think you have trouble with the ladies, pray you never meet Tomie! Tomie is one of Junji Ito’s most iconic works, and with how the stories go, it’s not hard to see why. The stories are always centered around Tomie, an extremely gorgeous but egocentric young woman whose beauty captivates every man that sees her. Whenever men meet Tomie, they fall for her, and they fall hard. They’re willing to do anything for her, anything to gain her affection, but at the same time, they get driven insane and inevitably kill her. The problem is that she keeps coming back, with the same face and personality that torments men.

Uzumaki

Uzumaki takes place in a quiet town called Kurozu-Cho, where very odd and terrifying things start to happen. Kirie, a teenage girl, lives a normal life until her boyfriend, Shuichi, suddenly suggests that they run away together in order to escape a curse in their town. He says that the town is cursed by a spiral, and that it manifests itself into everything, including humans. Kirie, thinking he’s just being weird, blows it off, but then she starts witnessing what he meant…and experiencing it too.

Hello! My name is Iyanna , and I just wanted to thank you for reading my first published blog entry! I hope you liked it, and I hope to see you soon again.