Junji Ito

He was born on 31 July 1963 in Nakatsugawa, Gifu Prefecture. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in a dental prosthetics school and began working as a dental technician. However, after the Umezu Award was created, a prize for new authors from the magazine Monthly Halloween (Asahi Sonorama), he decided to submit an original work hoping that Kazuo Umezu would read it.

As a result, his work Tomie received an honourable mention in the contest and became both his debut work and his most representative piece. Three years later, he quit his job as a dental technician to devote himself entirely to manga. From then on, he immersed himself in creating masterpieces such as The Town Without Streets, The Hanging Balloons, the Sôichi series, and Lovesickness.

In 1998, he began serialising Uzumaki in the weekly magazine Weekly Big Comic Spirits (Shogakukan). He continued to publish unique works such as Gyo and Kaidan, achieving enormous popularity in Japan and abroad.

In 2019, at the Eisner Awards in the United States, one of the most prestigious awards in the global comic book industry, the English translation of Junji Ito Masterpiece Collection Vol. 10: Frankenstein won the award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium. This was followed by two more awards in 2021 and another in 2022, bringing his total to four.

His international recognition was further cemented when he received the Honorary Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France and the Inkpot Award at San Diego Comic-Con in the United States in 2023. In 2025, he was inducted into the Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.