Junji Ito and Haruki Murakami

by Angelina Not (Lina)

(Note: some works mentioned on Ito Junji are in images - warning if you are sensitive to horror/grotesque images!)

If Haruki Murakami's style of writing is coined to be "dreamlike", Junji Ito’s narratives are taken to the next level into the nightmare realm. I wanted to write this post dedicated to one of my personal favorites writers and manga artists, known for his grotesque stories in the Japanese horror genre, and share some of the overlaps I found between the two writers as I read more of Murakami in class!

Similar to Murakami’s plots, Ito loves to mix mundane things in life with some supernatural aspects. In the case of his works, the horror that Ito writes about are beside murder or monsters, but more about outlandish powers that are outside of human control or comprehension. Oftentimes, most of the horrors stem from the very nature of our own faults, obsessions or fears - quite similar in which Murakami frames the sheep as some unknown, higher, evil being that brings the worst out of the characters it inhabits in the Wild Sheep Chase. Murakami’s character’s almost obsessive fixation on body parts with supernatural powers like Boku's girlfriend’s ears, reflects in Ito’s works as well, as he focuses on twisting human or animal anatomy into something supernatural and horrifying such as in Long Dream and Dissection Girl. Similar to Murakami’s often mention of insects, cats and sea related creatures such as with the “whale’s penis” or the “Dolphin Hotel'', Ito also particularly often chooses fish, caterpillars, slugs and cats as central powers in many of his stories. Notably, Ito also plays with the ocean/water/aquarium motif such as in the The Thing That Drifted Ashore, where the protagonist after visiting an aquarium, develops a phobia of the ocean. 

Additionally the fear of the unknown in Murakami’s stories (whether it is a double like in Sputnik Sweetheart, your own reflection in the mirror, or some higher being like the sheep) is also replicated in Ito’s stories of doppelgangers such as in Memories where character is haunted by visions of another version of herself or in Hallucinations where the character meets alternate versions of himself in his own mansion. Even with the abundance of all these detailed images in Ito’s stories or the descriptive imagery and metaphors in Murakami’s, both still leave an air of ambiguity of what will happen to the characters or what the point of the story even was. Lastly, both include their criticism of Japanese society in some way and channel anti-war sentiments often in their stories. Ito not only wrote a whole book based on his detestation for Japanese imperialism in Gyo Ugomeku Bukimi, but also poses similar questions on the concept of “identity” to its readers by always leaving his characters a blank slate, and for a lack of a better word, mediocre. It is definitely another question to say that they have influenced each other as they are quite similar in age and write on slightly different platforms, but the common patterns and inspirations of the two definitely show something further about the modern Japanese art and literature as a whole.