UZUMAKI BY JUNJI ITO

Kurouzu-cho is a small, fogbound town on the coast of Japan, and it is haunted by an unusual curse. The curse of the spiral. A reclusive young man named Shuichi Saito is the first to take notice of the spiral patterns popping up everywhere and having strange effects on people, most of them not even noticing what’s happening to them until it’s too late. No one takes Shuichi’s warnings about the horrifying delusions the spirals cause to those who become entranced by their hypnotic spell seriously, do to his past paranoia-induced ramblings that have given him the reputation of a mentally unbalanced conspiracy theorist. Not even his girlfriend takes him seriously at first. Shuichi’s father is the first of many to fall under the dangerous spell of the spiral, becoming obsessed with the whirling patterns until his obsession drives him to the brink of madness.

The story begins with Shuichi Saito trying to explain to his girlfriend that he thinks his father is being driven insane by his recently developed obsession with spirals. He collects hundreds of spiral shaped objects, hoarding them to the point of his house nearly overflowing with them. He refuses to take a bath unless he makes the water form a whirlpool before he jumps in, he even refuses to eat a bowl of soup unless his wife throws in a few spiral shaped fishcakes to please his bizzare fixation. Eventually, Shuichi’s father’s obsession with spirals becomes so extreme that he throws himself into the family pottery machine and sacrifices his life to become a human spiral. All of the bones in his body are crushed, his remains are contorted into a spiral of baggy flesh, leaving his wife and son to discover the horrifying sight of his grotesquely disfigured corpse balled up into a mess of limbs stretched beyond human capacity. The nightmare doesn’t end there. After Shuichi has his father cremated, even his ashes form a disfigured, humanoid spiral in the sky that looms over the terrified locals of Kurouzu-cho like the gaze of an all-powerful god. In that moment, everyone begins to realize that the curse of the spiral is very real.

After the tragic incident with Shuichi’s father, the spirals begin to contaminate and consume more and more victims with their hypnotic sadism. They turn school students into snails, pregnant women into bloodsucking monsters, they transform villagers' bodies into tree branch-like limbs that get tangled together when they get too close to each other, they even turn a girl’s hair into a living hypnosis wheel that can drive you insane if you look at the spiraling strands of hair for too long. The curse of the spiral is vicious and it doesn’t stop spreading until the entire island is consumed by its vengeful spell.

Before I started reading this manga, I asked myself “how can a cute and innocent thing like spirals possibly be scary?” Well, Uzumaki did a pretty great job of proving that they can be nightmarish little monstrosities. Uzumaki takes full advantage of its visual story-telling format, looking at the pages for long periods of time made me feel slightly dizzy at times, almost making me feel like I was becoming a victim of the spirals myself. It made the experience that much more surreal, being able to see the hypnotic effects the spirals have on the characters while also feeling some of their dizzying effects on my own vision. It’s a masochistic feast for the eyes, drawing you in with surreal body horror and mind-warping imagery. The paranoia, the delirious madness, the lovecraftian themes of normal, everyday people being driven insane by seemingly innocent obsessions. The scales keep getting higher, escalating from strange body disfigurement to full-on gory nightmare fuel.

If you’re a horror fan or a fan of lovecraftian themes and imagery, and you’re not all that familiar with what manga has to offer in terms of horror, Uzumaki is the best place to start. It doesn’t have a brilliant plot or deep characters with major story arcs, it’s about average, perfectly ordinary people getting drawn into something otherworldly that the human mind can’t possibly fathom without self-destructing. The story is also told in an episodic format, each chapter having its own self-contained narrative that slowly builds upon the alluring mystery and origins of the spiral curse. The ending also has that poetic lovecraftian touch of humanity being small, helpless and completely irrelevant in the face of greater things that humans can never hope to comprehend.