Uzumaki by Junji Ito (1997)

Uzumaki is a classic horror manga by Junji Ito, a grotesque, sprawling disaster epic with a very supernatural, cosmic horror spiraling down (no pun) from the outer rims of the storyline. It's often very sickening, and the mid-section, getting from the beginning of the story to its conclusion, seems to go the way of digressions and vignettes, some of which are shocking, some rather forgettable, but which seem presented in a confused, aimless manner. At first, we wonder: Is this building to something? Of course, in a graphic novel of this size, we know that it must. Some of Uzumaki is ridiculous, some of it sickening. All of it is fascinating and compelling. The artwork, rendered in beautiful black-and-white, is marvelous and full of hideous wonder.

Kirie and Shuichi are two teen lovers who live in Kurzouzu-cho, an obscure Japanese town with a singular curse upon it, wherein everything seems to center around spirals. Shuichi's father becomes obsessed with the spiral, and begins collecting examples before himself turning into a spiral, committing suicide in a spiral-like position. Soon, Shuichi's mother also succumbs to the spiral curse, and numerous examples of the "spiral spirit" if you will, erupt across the pages of Uzumaki, including the weird spiral funnel of smoke from the funeral cremations that spirals down to Dragonfly Pond, the sediment of which provides the raw clay by which Kirie's father crafts his ceramics, which are distorted, hideous-looking grotesque representations, in a spiral shape.

Kirie's father's kiln is haunted by monstrosities born from his weird ceramics. Kirie's hair begins to become a spiral creature, but Shuichi is able to clip it. We have strange characters like the "Jack in the Box" boy who resurrects as a dismembered corpse, the hospital ward of pregnant women who become living mosquitos and drain blood for their victims, and the "Snail People," whose eyes extend out after growing into sickening stalks, and who become huge living snails which one greedy cannibal at the end of Uzumaki carry shells that are "full of meat!" The gag reflex is activated.

Some of the images here are striking and unforgettable. A girl whose body "disappears" into itself, sucked into the spiral that grows on her forehead, has a single prominent eye that seems slightly inspired by Un Chien Andalou. It's a very surrealistic image, and the whole novel is a deep dive into the cesspool of avant-garde and nightmare-fueled horror. (But isn't that ALL horror?)

Like similar horror mangas (my personal favorite is Chainsaw Man) , Uzumaki is a visual tapestry of mutation and monstrosity, blood and gore and sickening visuals rendered in painstaking detail, in beautiful yet still bloody pen-and-ink splendor. This can be visually noisy at times, but is always beautiful nonetheless.

By the end of the novel, Kurouzu-cho has become the scene of a weird, dream-like disaster epic, as survivors of a horrible twister pack themselves into "row houses" at the center of town, and finally devolve into one twisted, living mass. This perhaps underscores a criticism of the rigid hierarchy of the Japanese class structure; or, perhaps not. Either way, the image is also one that is sickening, twisted; an image of Hell.

Kirie and Shuichi finally descend to the lower depths, the saga spiraling (ha-ha) to a shocking but not entirely unforseen conclusion. Afterward, we have a "lost chapter" concerning the discovery of a new galaxy (a spiral obviously) and the possession of an astronomer who becomes cursed and ultimately murderous.

Junji Ito seems possessed of a singular mind. His influences of classic horror combine intense, modern gore with a Lovecraftian sense of the cosmic and the strange, the inevitability of man's place as both a consumer and that which, in the end, shall be consumed. All o f this is enacted by a hideous, unknown, or unknowable process, as coldly and naturally (or supernaturally) as a gourmet scarfing a snail. Along the way to that final truth, he tries on the cap of various dreams. Some of them fit, some do not, all twist and turn in hypnotic circles of horror.

Excelsior!

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