Uzumaki: Spiral into Horror

AUTHOR: Ito, Junji

ARTIST: Junji Ito (illustrator); Steve Dutro (letterer); Izumi Evers (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Shogakukan (Japanese); VIZ Media (English)

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1998-2000

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1998-2000 (English translation, 2001-2002)

Publication History

Junji Ito’s Uzumaki (whirlpool) was originally serialized in Weekly Big Spirits and Weekly Big Comic Spirits from 1998 to 2000. English translations of individual chapters were released in issues 5.2 to 6.8 of PULP magazine, a defunct publishing imprint of VIZ Media specializing in alternative, experimental manga series aimed at adult audiences. Yuji Oniki’s English translation of Uzumaki, published by VIZ, was republished in three bound volumes between 2001 and 2002. Because the English translation of Uzumaki is laid out in the traditional Western reading format, Ito’s artwork is printed in reverse, differentiating the artwork from that seen in the original Japanese iteration of the series. Like the majority of serialized manga publications, Uzumaki’s visual content is primarily black and white, although each volume contains introductory pages with full-color images.

Plot

Uzumaki depicts the collapse of a Japanese coastal community called Kurozu-cho, which falls under a hypnotic curse. The series begins as protagonist Kirie Goshima sees the father of her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, observing a snail crawling along a wall. When she asks Shuichi why Mr. Saito was acting oddly, he explains that his father is becoming obsessed with helix-shaped objects. Soon afterward, Mr. Saito commits suicide by locking himself in a washing machine and contorting his body into a spiral. When he is cremated, a helix-shaped cloud forms in the sky. Before is dissipates it forms an image of Mr. Saito’s corpse, driving Shuichi’s mother insane; she commits suicide soon after.

Convinced that Kurozu-cho is a cursed place, Shuichi asks Kirie to leave town with him, but she is unwilling to abandon her family. The couple encounters a multitude of spiral-related horrors: Kirie’s friend Azami Kurotani develops a spiral-shaped scar on her head that literally consumes her, Mr. Goshima’s pottery is warped by spirits from the ash clouds that descend into Dragonfly Pond, two lovers from rival families twist their bodies together so that they can never be separated, and Kirie’s hair becomes possessed and starts draining her life force. Shuichi cuts off Kirie’s hair, saving her life.

The events in Kurozu-cho grow stranger. Kirie’s classmate Mitsuro becomes obsessed with her and jumps in front of a car to declare his love. Some of Kirie’s classmates transform into snail people. The black lighthouse overlooking the city emits a monstrous glow, and anyone who enters is burned to death. Kirie rescues her brother, Mitsuo, from the lighthouse and is badly injured. While recovering in the hospital, she encounters mosquitoes that fly in hypnotic spiral patterns and discovers pregnant women who are drinking human blood to feed their unborn children. In the final chapter of the volume, Kirie is pursued by a hurricane that hovers over Kurozu-cho, howling her name. Like the smoke clouds from the crematorium, the hurricane soon disappears into the center of Dragonfly Pond.

Eventually, Kurozu-cho is leveled by hurricanes. Kirie and her family move into a ramshackle row house infected with a virus that causes spiral-like growths to form on their skin. Eventually, Kirie’s family vacates the row house, and their skin soon heals.

The rest of Japan loses contact with Kurozu-cho, and a group of television reporters comes to investigate. As the crew drives through a tunnel toward the town, its vehicle is pursued and destroyed by a twister; only Chie Maruyama survives. Chie finds three children tied to stakes near the pond. She frees them, but they turn on her, displaying an ability to manipulate the wind. Chie screams, and the children are carried away in a hurricane. Chie encounters Kirie, who explains that the atmosphere of Kurozu-cho has become warped and that sudden movements can create whirlwinds. Kirie takes Chie to an old row house where she lives with her family and a crowd of townspeople, including Shuichi.

Chie, Kirie, and Mitsuo leave the row house to search for food and are attacked by a gang of men who ride whirlwinds. Back at the row house, they find an old map of Kurozu-cho that depicts the town as a spiral. A fight breaks out over who owns the map, and Kirie’s family (along with Chie and Shuichi) is ejected from the home. Desperate for food, they approach the gang of twister riders and learn they survive by eating snail people. Kirie’s father confronts them and is blown away by strong winds.

The group discusses leaving town. Chie reveals that the tunnel exit has turned into a spiral. They encounter and join up with a group of volunteers led by Tanizaki. Some of the volunteers begin transforming into snail people, and the group theorizes incorrectly that only people inside the row houses are safe from the curse.

Kirie’s group grows so hungry that they are forced to eat dead snail people to survive. When Kirie returns to her mother and brother’s shelter with snail-person meat, she learns that her mother has been blown away by the wind and her brother is transforming into a snail person. Kirie, Shuichi, Mitsuo, and Chie resolve to leave town, while Tanizaki stays behind to build shelters. The group becomes lost in the woods and encounters more of Tanizaki’s volunteer friends, who want to eat Mitsuo. Kirie carries her transformed brother to a cliff and tells him crawl to safety while the volunteers’ bodies contort into spirals.

When Kirie, Shuichi, and Chie emerge from the forest, they find that Kurozu-cho has been reconstructed into a spiral labyrinth. They encounter Tanizaki, who has grown older and claims not to have seen them in years; clearly, time is warped in the forest. Tanizaki tells them Kirie’s parents are at the center of the labyrinth. As they travel to the center, Chie becomes trapped in a building and is never seen again.

Kirie and Shuichi eventually reach the center of the labyrinth and find Dragonfly Pond drained, revealing a spiral staircase leading underground. On the way down, a spiral person attacks Shuichi and drags him over the edge. Kirie continues her descent and finds a massive spiral city beneath Kurozu-cho. The ground is made of the petrified corpses of the town’s residents, including Kirie’s parents. Kirie finds Shuichi alive, and the two twist their bodies together, completing the cycle of the spiral. The staircase raises and seals Dragonfly Pond, fulfilling the curse.

At the end of the final volume there is an additional “lost” chapter that takes place before Kirie’s hair is possessed by spirals in chapter 6. Shuichi discovers a new galaxy and reports his findings to local astronomer Mr. Torino. Soon, many people in Kurozu-cho discover new and unseen galaxies. Mr. Torino goes insane and tries to kill Kirie and Shuichi so he can take credit for discovering the galaxies. The couple is saved when the galaxies communicate with Mr. Torino simultaneously, causing his head to swell to a massive size and explode into a galaxy.

Volumes

• Uzumaki, Volume 1 (2001). Collects chapters 1-6. Kirie Goshima first encounters the spiral, which kills her boyfriend’s parents and possesses her hair.

• Uzumaki, Volume 2 (2002). Collects chapters 7-12. The spiral becomes more prevalent, affecting Kirie’s classmates and family members and culminating in the manifestation of a massive hurricane.

• Uzumaki, Volume 3 (2003). Collects chapters 13-19 plus “lost” chapter “Galaxies.” Kurozu-cho is destroyed by hurricanes, and the ruins transform into a gigantic spiral.

Characters

• Kirie Goshima, the protagonist, is a female high school student with light-colored hair. Despite her serious countenance, she is kindhearted and conscientious. She is described as hypnotic, which may be why so many of the horrors in Kurozu-cho occur in her presence. She is the last resident of the town to succumb to the spiral’s curse.

• Uzumaki, though more of a force than a character, is the manga’s antagonist. The spiral’s curse pervades Kurozu-cho and is responsible for the town’s destruction. It manifests in numerous ways, taking control of helix shapes and other natural phenomena such as hurricanes, dust devils, and whirlpools. Uzumaki can physically transform people. Uzumaki’s final incarnation is as a monstrous spired city beneath Dragonfly Pond.

• Shuichi Saito is a tall teenager with short black hair, sunken cheeks, and dark circles around his eyes. He is Kirie’s boyfriend. Having lost both his parents to the curse, he is sensitive to the dangerous presence of spirals in the town, using this awareness to protect Kirie from harm. He grows increasingly distant and paranoid.

• Mr. Saito is Shuichi’s father and the first victim of the curse. He is an older man with glasses and a receding hairline. He mangles himself in a washing machine. Both Shuichi and his mother see his twisted form in numerous spiral objects, including clouds, whirlpools, dead millipedes, and tree growth rings. During these hallucinations, he invites them to join him in the spiral.

• Mitsuo Goshima is Kirie’s brother. He is a strong-willed but immature boy with straight black hair. Although he often teases Kirie, the two grow closer as the situation in Kurozu-cho worsens. Eventually he turns into a snail person.

• Chie Maruyama is a young reporter with shoulder-length black hair who comes to investigate Kurozu-cho after the rest of Japan loses contact with the town. She is horrified by what she discovers but bravely accompanies Kirie and Shuichi in the search for Kirie’s missing parents. She becomes trapped in the row-house maze on the way to Dragonfly Pond and is never seen again.

• Tanizaki is a volunteer trapped in Kurozu-cho after coming to help clean up wreckage left by the hurricanes. Prior to Kirie and Shuichi’s trip into the forest, Tanizaki is a young man with a glowering expression; when they return, he is older and has grown a beard. He is willing to do anything to survive, even if it means eating the meat of the snail people, who used to be human. He is last seen disposing of bodies in the row-house labyrinth.

Artistic Style

Uzumaki is collected in three volumes, each beginning with four pages of watercolor plates painted in muted tones that establish Kurozu-cho’s gloomy atmosphere. Following these plates are densely packed black-and-white images dark with Ito’s heavy line work, which is a crucial aspect of Uzumaki’s oppressive atmosphere. VIZ Media’s English translation of Uzumaki uses the traditional left-to-right reading sequence seen in Western comics.

Ito is known for his highly realistic manga artwork. The images in Uzumaki are claustrophobic in their level of detail, heightening the manga’s looming sense of dread. The skies over Kurozu-cho are often darkened by heavy cross-hatching, and as the story progresses, spiral-shaped cloud formations drawn in thin, close lines (reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night) begin to appear. Buildings and other human-made structures are drawn in precise, razor-sharp black lines that contrast with the wispy, free-flowing lines of trees and ferns permeating the town. Appropriately, these twisting, curved forms become increasingly widespread as Kurozu-cho falls further under the spiral’s spell.

A primary contributing factor to Uzumaki’s chilling atmosphere is Ito’s ability to depict the internal emotional states of his characters. Kirie Goshima rarely smiles and is usually seen with a worried expression on her face. Often, characters’ physical appearances signify their moral compunctions: “good” characters’ faces are symmetrical and drawn with minimal lines and white space, while the various antagonists are drawn with close, hard lines, their exaggerated features signifying evil intentions. Characters cursed by the spiral are often first depicted as traditionally beautiful. However, as the curse takes hold, their beauty fades, and they transform into monsters. This visual trope becomes increasingly prevalent in Uzumaki as the curse infiltrates the town.

Themes

Uzumaki deals primarily with supernatural themes. Kirie encounters an array of otherworldly beings during the manga’s progression, including ghosts, zombies, snail people, and vampiric mosquito women. Supernatural occurrences in Kurozu-cho are so commonplace that they become almost comical. Ito highlights the underlying humor in Uzumaki through mini comic strips at the end of each volume. These amusing semiautobiographical strips are not strictly part of Uzumaki’s narrative; instead, they provide a tongue-in-cheek, fictionalized account of Ito’s experiences writing the series.

One of the major themes in Uzumaki is obsession. The manga begins with Mr. Saito’s disturbing fascination with helix-shaped objects. As the narrative progresses, the obsession spreads and literally spirals out of control. The curse usually begins with a character demonstrating an unhealthy fixation. Kirie’s friend Sekino becomes totally absorbed by her desire for attention, and her hair turns into spirals. Numerous male figures declare their undying love for Kirie and end up stalking her. The antagonists in Uzumaki generally begin as good people who become hypnotized by spirals, falling prey to the curse. This is also demonstrated by characters who have the opportunity to leave the town but choose not to, such as Kirie’s father, who wants to stay to dedicate himself to the art of the spiral.

Uzumaki is a fatalistic horror manga because the characters cannot escape the curse’s vortex. While Kirie and Shuichi fight to the end in their attempts to survive, Ito’s narrative is structured and presented in such a way that readers realize the townspeople of Kurozu-cho are doomed from the beginning. Events become increasingly violent and bizarre as the town spirals into destruction. Ito’s already densely packed illustrations grow darker and more disturbing, emphasizing the foreboding nature of the curse as the world spirals out of control.

Impact

Ito is most famous for his flagship title, Tomie (first published in an English collection in 2001), which spawned multiple films. Although Uzumaki was also made into a feature film, the manga retains a degree of “cult” status and is not as popular as the longer-running Tomie series. Nevertheless, the VIZ Media edition of Uzumaki was nominated for the Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of Foreign Material, and in 2009, the Young Adult Library Services Association included Uzumaki in its Top Ten Great Graphic Novels for Teens. Uzumaki has received favorable reviews in literary magazines such as Rain Taxi and on book-review Web sites such as PopImage and Ninth Art. Because of the series’ sheer strangeness and apocalyptic themes, Uzumaki is often compared to the works of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, indicating its potential to become a classic of the horror genre.

Films

Uzumaki. Directed by Higuchinsky. Omega Micott, 2000. This film adaptation, cowritten by Ito and Kengo Kaji, stars Eriko Hatsune as Kirie Goshima and Fhi Fan as Shuichi Saito and covers most of the events in Uzumaki’s first volume. Plot differences mainly involve shifting the order of events to fit the script; major changes include Kirie’s father’s suicide by drill and Shuichi’s possession by spirals during the film’s conclusion. Many shots in the film are directly based on the manga’s framing, and the film camera’s blue lens filter re-creates the washed out, mournful tones seen in Ito’s watercolors at the beginning of each volume. The film ismore intentionally comedic than the original manga.

Further Reading

Furuya, Usamaru. Suicide Circle (2002).

Ito, Junji. Tomie (2001).

Umezu, Kazuo. The Drifting Classroom (1972-1974).

Bibliography

Ito, Junji. “A Conversation with the Creator of Uzumaki.” Interview by Akiko Iwane. PULP 5, no. 2 (July, 2001).

McRoy, Jay. “Spiraling into Apocalypse: Sono Shion’s Suicide Circle, Higuchinsky’s Uzumaki, and Kurosawa Kiyoshi’s Pulse.” In Nightmare Japan: Contemporary Japanese Horror Cinema. New York: Rodopi, 2008.