You might have remembered part of my comics haul a while back that I picked up the hardcover omnibus of the horror manga Uzumaki by Junji Ito. Out of all the items I picked up that day, this was one of the first that I dug into simply because I had heard about it for so long and seen some of the panels prior. My interest was already very much piqued. I finally shelled out the $32 to get the hardcover (go big or go home, right?)
I have to say, from the very first story entitled, “The Spiral Obsession”, I was hooked. The book tells the story of Kirie, a high school girl who’s town has become the center of the supernatural curse focused around spirals. This isn’t your traditional horror story filled with the expected horror tropes and usual scares. Full disclosure: There are creepy kids and the walking (or bouncing?) dead. However; one of the elements that make this manga so terrifying is it how it crosses into territory which is rarely explored. Things that make you uncomfortable. Irrational parents who lose their minds and their children’s lack of control over their parent’s own well being. Slow and uncontrollable transformations into grotesque creatures. Spiral clouds made from the cremated ashes of loved ones circling the sky seemingly calling your name. The fear of not knowing where, when, and how the spiral will appear in your life and torment you next. Nothing is expected in this book.
The tone and themes also reminded me of some other similar material I’ve been interested in as of late. Specifically, a book called Fen, which is a compilation short stories by Daisy Johnson came to mind. I wouldn’t call these horror stories, but they are set within a place bordering fantasy and reality in which characters transform into creatures, crones seduce young men, and people return from the dead to find their loved ones. The overall tone is damp, dark, and brooding. In addition to Fen, I would not be surprised if Uzumaki inspired portions of the podcast Tanis. The podcast deals with the conspiracies surrounding the myth of Tanis and the host’s journey to find out what Tanis truly is and why it seems to have a mysterious connection to his northwest home. It’s a docudrama akin to War of the Worlds. Stories surrounding Eld Fen, King Wurm, a cult called the Grackles all echo similar themes from the Uzumaki manga.
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On top of the absolutely primo horror content, the artwork in this manga is absolutely stunning and disturbing. I recommend not reading it at night before bed. I’m not a huge fan of manga in general, but Uzumaki seems next level. Everything with the exception of a few intro pages in chapters is done in black and white ink. I prefer the black and white to the color excerpts. It’s incredibly effective in showing emotion, despair, and transformation within the characters faces. You can see this specifically in the chapter, “Medusa”, when Kirie’s self-proclaimed rival, Sekino, is having her energy drained by her spiral cursed hair. The shading below her eyes and cheekbones show how depraved and weak she’s become. You can see a similar treatment of Kirie’s boyfriend Suichi throughout the manga as he endures more and more stress. This manga is could easily be viewed as an art book you place on your coffee table (albeit in a weird, weird house) in comparison to being a manga that you sit down and read. It’s well worth purchasing for the artwork alone.
I will say only one story out of the 18 felt somewhat out of place and forced. “Jack-in-the-Box” stood out to me as different from the tone of the other chapters. Without giving away spoilers, it hits upon more traditional horror themes with a bit of a twist (no pun intended!) However, the panels in this chapter are some of the most grotesque and graphic panels of the entire manga. It’s interesting that this was left in considering at the end of the omnibus they made the decision to add some cut stories as a bonus. This definitely feels as though it could be one of the chapters on the same chopping block since it didn’t do much to further the plot or overall story.
Overall, I was so disappointed when I finished this. I genuinely looked forward to having a quiet moment each day where I could fuel my nail biting habit with genuinely terrifying thoughts. I appreciated how carefully Junji Ito has paid attention to those deep dark recesses of the human consciousness that allow us to think the unthinkable. Also, I’ll never be able to eat escargot again, so thanks.translates as the spiral, or the swirl. The story is about a Japanese town that is suffering under a supernatural curse in which its inhabitants become obsessed about spirals they see everywhere, in nature and so on, leading to extreme obsession or extreme fear and grotesque body transformations. A horror manga by arguably Japan’s foremost horror manga artist (at least in the West), Junji Ito, and this being arguably his most popular work.
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This is proper, afraid-to-turn-the-page horror. I thought to myself: what could be so scary about spirals? Ito made them scary by using a lot of psychological tricks and highlighting the human experiences. Here is one chapter I will talk about as an example: chapter two concerns the mother of one of the main characters and she developed a deep phobia for spirals because she hears her husband’s ghost in them. She’s taken to the hospital when she cuts off her hair and the tips of her fingers because there are spirals in her fingerprints. The chapter is basically a panic chase for her son to keep his mother from finding out that one of the inner ear bones, the cochlea, is a spiral. It ends horrifically. It was one of the most effective little horror stories that I’ve ever read, perfectly set up and written.
There are 20 chapters in Uzumaki and for the first half of them, each one tells a little contained spiral-related horror story in this town, where things keep getting worse and worse. Ito’s imagination is really impressive, and so is the quality of his horror writing. Each chapter is well written with a good setup, an effective building of dread, and because of the unfamiliar subject matter you never have a good idea where the story is going. You are effectively a passenger on the rollercoaster of Ito’s imagination. Finally he pounces on you the big moment of horror in a page-wide panel and it is unsettling every time. There is imagery in here that really creeped me out. The art style plays an important role here too. Ito draws his stories in a really clean, meticulous style, full of straight lines for all the houses and furniture. I think he did this on purpose to make the environment feel realistic and for the spiral shapes stand out more. And perhaps the contrast between the straight lines of our artificial environments and spirals as a natural shape is a comment on how we have removed ourselves from nature, and this curse is nature taking revenge.
There are two main characters, a young couple, and most events we see from the perspective of the girl. They are both curiously passive about all that is happening and this could be the result of a general madness that has fallen over the town. The girl’s passivity is tied to hope, she never loses hope that things will be ok, and that seems to halt her from acting, whereas her boyfriend’s passivity is tied to resignation. He has the clearer idea of what is going on but through that has also lost all will to keep fighting against it.
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Later in the book, so many horrific events have been occurring that the whole town descends into madness. The separate little stories of the first chapters now start to combine as pieces of worldbuilding that Ito has been creating, like puzzle pieces finally clicking together. Some of the horror here is strange in an arresting way that made me giggle in response, and some of it is viscerally, disgustingly wrong in a way that makes me doubt my own capacity to digest this stuff. In horror fashion, the situation becomes inescapable. The spiral itself as a visual object tends to draw you in when you look at it, and Ito stretches that to include the loss of control and loss of autonomy and builds the fear on that. The town itself becomes impossible to exit as it tries to turn itself into a spiral and gets decimated in all sorts of ways.
I was fascinated from start to finish. Ito has a great imagination and towards the end he takes a lot of disparate elements from the earlier chapters and lets them build upon each other. He drives the concept so far into territories of desperation that he is showing things on
Later in the book, so many horrific events have been occurring that the whole town descends into madness. The separate little stories of the first chapters now start to combine as pieces of worldbuilding that Ito has been creating, like puzzle pieces finally clicking together. Some of the horror here is strange in an arresting way that made me giggle in response, and some of it is viscerally, disgustingly wrong in a way that makes me doubt my own capacity to digest this stuff. In horror fashion, the situation becomes inescapable. The spiral itself as a visual object tends to draw you in when you look at it, and Ito stretches that to include the loss of control and loss of autonomy and builds the fear on that. The town itself becomes impossible to exit as it tries to turn itself into a spiral and gets decimated in all sorts of ways.
I was fascinated from start to finish. Ito has a great imagination and towards the end he takes a lot of disparate elements from the earlier chapters and lets them build upon each other. He drives the concept so far into territories of desperation that he is showing things on
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