Junji Ito

In 2019, Ito received an Eisner Award for his manga adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Tomie was inspired by the death of one of his classmates, he felt strange that a boy he knew suddenly disappeared from the world and expected him to show up again, and that’s how he came up with the idea of a girl who is supposed to have died but then just shows up as if nothing had happened. Gyo was influenced by his anti-war feelings, developed when he was a child, due to his parents' tragic and frightening war stories. “The Hanging Balloons” was also based on a childhood dream.

In 2006, Junji married Ishiguro Ayako (石黒亜矢子), a picture book artist. As of 2013, they have two children.

Tomie was adapted into a series of films, beginning in 1999. Several other works of Ito's have subsequently been adapted for film and television:

Itō first began writing and drawing manga as a hobby while working as a dental technician in around 1984. In 1987, he submitted a short story to Gekkan Halloween (月刊ハロウィン , lit. Monthly Halloween) that won an honorable mention in the Kazuo Umezu Prize (with Umezu himself as one of the judges). This story was later serialized as Tomie.

Junji Ito (Japanese: 伊藤 潤二 , Hepburn: Itō Junji, born July 31, 1963) is a Japanese horror mangaka. Some of his most notable works include Tomie, a series chronicling an immortal girl who drives her stricken admirers to madness, Uzumaki, a three-volume series about a town obsessed with spirals, and Gyo, a two-volume story where fish are controlled by a strain of sentient bacteria called "the death stench." His other works are Itou Junji Kyoufu Manga Collection, a collection of different short stories including a series of stories named Souichi's Journal of Delights, and Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu, a self-parody about him and his wife living in a house with two cats.

Junji Itō was born on 31 July 1963 in Sakashita, now a part of Nakatsugawa, Gifu. He began his experience in the horror world at a very young age; his two older sisters would read Kazuo Umezu and Shinichi Koga in magazines, and consequently, he began reading them too. He grew up in the countryside, in a small city next to Nagano. In the house where he lived the bathroom was at the end of an underground tunnel, where there were spider crickets, such experiences were later reflected in his works.