Junji Ito: Collection collection

A spiral creeping into the clouds, the hair and the skin of the inhabitants of Kurouzu-cho: that is the signature of Junji Ito, the Japanese mangaka who turned horror into an art of contamination! His stories start from a harmless detail, a foul smell in an Okinawa hotel room, a young woman knocking at the door, before tipping into the most methodical nightmare. Tomie grows back from the smallest piece of herself, Uzumaki drags an entire little town into its geometric vertigo, and the fish of Gyo scuttle on their metal legs right into people's homes. The linework is meticulous, almost clinical, and it is this surgical precision that makes the unspeakable believable. Adapted in 2018 by Studio Deen into an animated anthology, this gallery of terrors continues in the collected volumes, the POP figures and the mugs, where dread takes surprisingly endearing forms.