If you’re looking for something creepy, tragic, and kind of pretty to look at, then you’ll love Junji Ito’s manga Uzumaki or “Spiral” for people who haven’t seen Naruto AT ALL. Uzumaki follows the story of a girl named Kirie Goshima and her small town of Kurozo-cho where it goes through some weird and bizarre changes. To start off, let me tell you a little about the spiral that you’ll learn just from reading this manga. The spiral is a shape that’s practically infinite. It goes on and on and is seen just about everywhere around you. Sea shells, snails, fingerprints, even the swirling pattern of the water as it goes down the drain makes a spiral that feels like it’s sucking you in. And believe me. The story you read is about how the town of Kurozo-cho gets caught up in the hypnotizing pattern they call the uzumaki.
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| Are you dizzy yet? |
As I’ve said, the town goes through many chapters where the townsfolk are practically thrown into the spiral. In the first chapter, we meet Kirie’s boyfriend Shuichi Saito, a pretty well-rounded person who’s life is plagued by the spirals that haunt and possess his father. Even on her way to meet Shuichi at the train station from his high school (in another town of course), Kirie runs into Shuichi’s father staring at an empty snail shell on the wall.
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| Love at first sight. How romantic! |
Things really turn out awful when Shuichi’s father becomes crazed about spirals. The stress gets so bad for Shuichi that he asks Kirie to elope with him just to get out of the town that has a terrible curse on it. But Kirie refuses thinking he’s just stressed, but it gets harder to leave the town, and she watches as the spiral slowly captures Shuichi’s father. Shuichi’s father collects everything with the swirling pattern on it, from sea shells to snails and only eats spiral-shaped fishcakes in his miso soup and stirs his bathwater before getting in. The spirals start to get even worse to the point where the death of his father is a large spread on the page that would make curly hair become straight to the tips. The father coils his whole body into a wooden tub with ignoring the fact that he had any bones in his body. With Ito’s work, words can never describe the image that’s seen on that page. But even in death and beyond, Shuichi’s father is absorbed into the spiral as the smoke from his cremated body forms a spiral in the sky and twists down into a pond near Kirie’s house, making Shuichi’s mother go insane and gets sent to a hospital for developing a phobia of spirals. Hair buns, food, the I.V. tube that forms a spiral, sends her into a frenzy. His mother feels like her husband is talking to her through the spirals that appear in different ways even to the point of shaving her head of curly hair and cutting the skin from her fingers and toes. It becomes even worse when she finds out that there’s a spiral in the ear in the form of the cochlea and jabs a pair of scissors into her ears (don’t worry it’s not seen so don’t be squeamish). But with how the art is with Ito’s manga, scissors jabbed in someone’s ears is the least gross out thing you’ll have to worry about.
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| How hair-raising!! |
With Shuichi’s family dead from the spirals, nothing is ever right with him and, along with Kirie, is cursed to see the spirals consume every single person in Kurozo-cho. What I just told you were the first couple chapters of this horrifying manga that only the twisted mind of Junji Ito could create. The stories vary from large curling hair sucking the life from you to people slowly tuning into giant snails, the tales become more tragic until the very end of the city and everyone in it. The manga is a brilliant piece of work that leaves you wanting to read and at the same time fearful to even turn the next page. Uzumaki is a tragic tale of a town gone straight to hell, and hopefully you’ll get that small feeling when you read the whole story. There’s even a segment at the end of each chapter where Ito is obsessed with the spirals and wants to eat, collect, and consume himself with the art of spirals for inspiration on Uzumaki.
I can admit that some chapters seemed a little forced into having something to do with spirals. One chapter talked about how mosquitoes fly into a spiral pattern to put people to sleep. While Kirie is in the hospital, there’s an increased number of pregnancies that lead to the pregnant women drilling patients and drinking every drop of blood in the bodies. It’s mostly because the female mosquitoes are the ones that drink blood for their eggs. The one before it deals with a lighthouse with a horrible light that when it turns on, anyone in the lighthouse will burn into a crisp. They’re good chapters that leads up to other chapters, but it kind of forces us to pay attention to a spiral that I’m not sure really exists. I can’t necessarily judge on what we know and don’t know about lighthouses or mosquitoes, but it’s not like it’s hampering on the story in any way. Other than that, the stories are creepy, unique and gives you that feeling that something like spirals consuming people might actually happen seeing as we don’t notice spirals until we think about them. The manga was even made into a horror movie that shows the different spiral-related deaths that come to some of the towns people, but I recommend reading the manga to get the whole effect of this small town going in ruins because of a shape.
For Uzumaki I give it 5 out of 5 swirly lollipops. Well, I needed something nice to end on with all the gore you’ll get from the manga. And it’s not like some spirals like sushi rolls, cinnamon buns and those giant ass lollipops aren’t good. So until next time, this is Minaku the Otaku with your manga management of the week.
