I read Junji Ito’s Uzumaki recently, a thick 600-page horror manga about a town that is “contaminated with spirals.” The story follows Kirie and her boyfriend Shuichi as they witness the town of Kurouzu-cho spiral into insanity, haunted by the mesmerizing yet ever mysterious shape.
It’s an interesting premise. The main antagonist is not a tangible person, nor a being like a ghost. It’s a shape. We encounter spiral formations everywhere in our day to day lives, not paying it much mind; Ito turns this seemingly innocuous shape into something ominous and much more threatening than your typical horror villain. The spiral antagonist plays surprisingly well into typical horror scenes of gore and violence while simultaneously invoking a dark, psychological element.
The body horror is excellent. It’s disgusting, horrific, and I couldn’t look away. I won’t say exactly what is depicted as I don’t think my words would do it justice and a level of surprise should be kept for the impact of the page turn. But let’s just say that you will see people twist and contort into inhuman forms, be mangled and disfigured, stitched clumsily back together, grow and protrude out of their bodies what shouldn’t be possible, and experience a degree of deformation so grotesque that it could only be conjured in a vicious fever dream, all of this depicted in an appalling amount of detail. At one point I couldn’t even bring myself to turn the page because the images were so revolting that I did not want to touch the paper. Perhaps it sounds impossible but when I laid my finger on the picture, I could feel all the unnatural bumps and sickly skin, which quickly caused me to snap my arm back. I’m sure there are psychotic killers out there jealous they hadn’t dreamt up the torture that Ito has. This is mainly due to Ito’s fantastic art style, which has a level of realism and detail to it not commonly seen in most Japanese art, all while remaining distinctly within the realms of anime, giving it a hauntingly beautiful appearance. Even the pages where not much is happening give off an uneasy feeling, be it the distorted background of Kurouzu-cho or the eerie, mannequin expressions the characters wear that without a single word of dialogue express a sense of brewing madness within.
However, the initial shock wears off around halfway through the book. It’s not that the art quality gets any worse. I just got sort of numb to all of it. That is to say that I just didn’t find the book very scary. Repulsive and disturbing, yes, but not scary. The fear feels very surface level after the hundredth instance of a human doing something a human probably can’t do while still being alive. And because most of the gore involves corpses and not monsters, it wasn’t something I would lie awake at night fearing. And while the designs and illustrations are impressive, the stories amount to little more than ghost stories that you would tell around a campfire. For example, one chapter is about a lighthouse that melts people, another is about hair growing out with a mind of its own, another is about a corpse coming to life when Shuichi and Kirie try to open up the casket. And as you might have noticed, these stories don’t seem to have much to do with spirals. In my opinion, the book doesn’t go all the way with the ominous spiral idea, only the beginning and end heavily involving spirals while the middle part only somewhat adheres to that theme in a way that could allow spirals to be removed with the story intact. Even in the latter half of the story some of the things Ito comes up with to inject the spiral theme is just so ridiculous that it comes across as a comedy, like the gang that uses spiraling whirlwinds to fly around. But I guess horror is more of a personal taste, as I’ve heard of many people being deeply traumatized by the book. Although I’m not sure I believe that those stories aren’t just exaggerations.
There is one chapter though, chapter two, that I think was the most successful at putting me on edge, albeit still not exactly scary. It’s about Shuichi’s mother who has been hospitalized due to an extreme phobia of spirals, which has led her to shave all her hair off to avoid seeing the whorls, and for her to cut off the skin on her fingers to avoid seeing the swirling fingerprints. The page that shows her doing this is really great and disgusting, and more importantly provides a fear of what horrifying thing she might do next in her frenzy to remove all the spirals on her body. This fear intensifies when Shuichi notices a doctor’s anatomical chart that shows a small spiraling cavity deep inside the human ear: the cochlea. If Shuichi’s mother is extreme enough to cut off the tips of her fingers to be rid of the spirals, what will she do if she finds out that there is a spiral inside of her? Well, you don’t even want to think about it, but the idea is implanted in your head. It’s this incredible suspense that hovers over this segment that makes it my favorite chapter in the book.
Despite not being all that scary I still enjoyed reading Uzumaki. If you approach it less as a horror story and more as a bizarre, Alice in Wonderland type of fairy tale then I think it works better. In typical cosmic horror fashion, the threat is mostly unexplained and the ending is very vague. You can try to make sense of the happenings in Kurouzu-cho, to figure out what exactly the spiral wants, or if it’s even an entity that has want at all. Or you can accept the strangeness and find pleasure in the fascinating abhorrence of it all. Either way, it’s a good read.