The Mind-bending Horror Manga

Uzumaki by Itou Junji

Most people might not know what a manga is, so let me explain this to those who fall in that category. It is nothing more than a usual comic that we read in English. However, it is written in Japanese by Japanese people, of course! 

I wasn't much of a manga reader but I started off my manga journey with Junji Itou's manga. Junji is a horror manga writer. One of his wonderful manga come by the name of Uzumaki. Uzumaki in Japanese means Spirals. This manga specifies about spirals, obsessions with spirals along with the phobias. This manga consists of 20 chapters specially drawn and written by Itou Junji and his team. Uzumaki is about a town "contaminated" by spirals and how it affects people's minds and plays a huge role on each and every unique chapter of this story.

Starting with chapter 1 of Uzumaki, "The Spiral Obsession Part 1". Here, the main character of this entire manga, Kirie Goshima explains the unnatural phenomenon noticed by her and her classmate Shuichi Saito, also her boyfriend, who transferred to a neighboring town, Midoriyama-Shi. The town that they live in, is Kurozu-cho, the town contaminated by spirals. The sky has spiral shaped clouds along with normal clouds, the water has whirlpools, there are small tornadoes, the grass are twisted naturally into spiral shapes. All of it refers to spirals. In this chapter, Kirie talks about her friend, Shuichi's father's obsession with spirals to the point where he stopped working and started collecting spirals. Kirie noticed Shuichi's father in a dark alleyway, staring at a snail shell and found it weird. Afterwards she hesitates to tell Shuichi about this yet, ends up telling him. Shuichi was skeptical about Kurozu-cho from the beginning, being a brilliant child, he notices his surroundings in both Kurozu-cho and Midoriyama-shi. 

Then, we can see further in the chapter, that Kirie's father is a potter. Being a small countryside town, everyone knows each other which is how Shuichi's father ends up at Kirie's house, asking her father to make him a piece with the "art of spirals". 

Furthermore into the story, Kirie goes to visit Shuichi's parents at their house and what she sees next leaves her traumatized. He wanted to show Kirie how he can make spirals within his body and started to spin his eyes independently to each other. After a few days, Kirie's father sent Kirie to deliver the piece to Shuichi's house. That is when Kirie was surprised with how Shuichi's father started to push his tongue out of his mouth and made a snail-like shape with it. Kirie then ran off and told Shuichi all about it. 

In the second chapter, "Spiral Obsession Part 2", after a few days, the whole town got to know about the death of Shuichi's father and went to attend his funeral. After getting there, Kirie sympathized with Shuichi but ended up getting to know the twisted truth of how he actually died. The town knew that he had fallen down the stairs and died while the true story was pure horror. The truth was, he ordered himself a huge circular tub and bended his whole body and broke every single bones in order to turn himself into his horrifying obsession, a human spiral. 

Moreover, when his body was being cremated, his ashes turned into the shape of a spiral. Which then turned into a facial shape, the dead man's face. Just like the time when Kirie went over to Shuichi's house, she saw his father's horrid spiral-shaped tongue, the ashes did the exact same thing. Shuichi's mother collapsed after seeing that. 

Then, Shuichi's mother was hospitalized and she grew a deadly trauma of spirals. She was so traumatized that she cut off her fingertips and went bald. She claimed to see her husband's dead body in every spiral she saw. According to her, he was calling her by her name, asking her to join him in the world of spirals. After some time, she got to know from her dream that there are spirals in her ears too, which we call the cochlea. She then pierced her ears with sharp scissors and lost sense of balance and sense of hearing. Due to excessive blood loss, she ended up dying within a couple of hours. 

In the next 18 chapters also takes place even more terrifying events that would give goosebumps to the body. Kirie gets targeted by the spiral multiple times throughout the story but it comes to an ultimate conclusion. The town gets rebuilt into a spiral shaped house all over. All the houses are connected with the spiral while all the people get stuck inside the house due to severe weather issues and because of the fear of being targeted by the spiral. When Kirie and Shuichi r
eaches the middle of the spiral out of curiosity, they find a spiral shaped staircase that goes way further down. Shuichi falls down from the staircase as it was extremely narrow and Kirie being worried, rushes down. After reaching down, she finds ancient ruins of spirals where the ground was made by the people who fell into the town of spirals, which was everyone from Kurozu-cho. Walking through this menacing scene, Kirie finds her parents turned to stones, frozen in time. She finally finds Shuichi but his legs broken from the fall. Shuichi, hopeless, encourages Kirie to go on without him. But her knowing everyone she loves is dead and only he is alive, he is the only one left who truly understands him and whom she truly cares about, she gives up the search and lies down with him. Their bodies all tangled up, they became a part of the spiral. Time went infinitely slow for them, as if stuck in time.

Not the happy ending everyone wishes for, but really, this story struck me and never left my mind ever since i read it. I have read it countless times throughout the years. Uzumaki is something that never fails to make me feel better and empty simultaneously, as if, a never-ending cycle. Even now, just writing about it, makes me relive when I last read it. I honestly think this will be a good read for psychological horror lovers out there. Thank you for reading this.

Reference: https://w1.uzumaki-manga.online/