Junji Ito – Uzumaki (2000) Review

9/10

Uzumaki 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. 

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.

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 the page that you’ve never seen before anywhere and you are presented with something unique, and I was always curious about what was going to happen next. Not all the material in the book plays a key role in the conclusion and some chapters seem like dead ends in the story as we get to the end. So, looking back, the plot is a bit loose and meandering, but the journey is fantastic.