伊藤 潤二
Born 1963
The former dental technician from Gifu who became the best-known horror mangaka in the world. Read from the closing, as a 9.
9Filed under 9. The Closing takes a completion, and this entry is releases one.
Junji Ito was born in 1963 in Gifu Prefecture and worked as a dental technician while drawing horror in his spare time. In 1987 his story Tomie received an honourable mention in the Kazuo Umezu Prize, named after the horror artist he most admired, and he soon turned to manga full time.
Tomie grew into a long-running series about a girl who cannot be killed and drives those around her to murder. Uzumaki, about a town consumed by spirals, and Gyo, in which fish walk out of the sea on mechanical legs, followed, along with hundreds of short stories, many collected in English as Shiver and Smashed.
Ito's horror depends on obsession and on the image held back until a page is turned. His line is clean and precise, which makes the grotesque more disturbing rather than less, and his stories rarely explain the forces behind them. He has named H. P. Lovecraft among his influences.
He has won several Eisner Awards for English editions of his work, and his short story "The Enigma of Amigara Fault" is one of the most widely shared horror comics online. He is the first name most international readers learn in manga horror.
Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 36, which folds down to 9. The weight sits in “Junji”, which carries 19 on its own and reduces to 1.
What the 9 brings is reckoning. The reference files it as a completion. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 9's sense of a cycle closing and something being released.
The vowels alone reduce to 9, the consonants to 9. The subject wants exactly what it appears to want, which is reckoning — an unusually undivided reading.
Counted another way the answer changes. 人格 core is 33, 総格 total is 41, a 5 and born is 1963, a 1. The title says 9; the subject says otherwise, and the subject is the harder evidence.
The 9 asks you to work out what survived the ending. The 9 sentimentalises. An ending is not automatically a meaning, and the reference tries not to pretend otherwise. The other entries that reduce to 9 are collected on The Closing.