Uzumaki
Uzumaki, a horror manga (Japanese comic book) by Ito Junji, originally published in 1998–99 in the magazine Big Comic Spirits in vols. 7–39. It was released in North America in 2001–02 by VIZ Media in the now-discontinued magazine Pulp. The title, Uzumaki (“spiral”), is conventionally untranslated when referring to the work in English. The story is narrated by high-school student Goshima Kirie, who explains how supernatural spirals have infested her home of Kurouzu-cho, a fictional coastal town. The story follows Kirie and her boyfriend, Saito Shuichi, as they try to survive their town becoming evermore contaminated with spirals and begin to uncover more about the curse giving rise to the spirals.
Plot
Goshima Kirie begins to notice strange things as she rushes to meet her boyfriend, Saito Shuichi: she nearly runs into a whirlwind and finds Shuichi’s father sitting in an alley. The man ignores her and instead focuses all of his attention on a snail shell stuck to the side of a building. When Kirie meets Shuichi and tells him about the encounter, the boy confesses that his father had been behaving strangely prior to Kirie seeing him. Shuichi, who goes to school in another city, suggests that Kirie leave town with him, because, he claims, there is something wrong with the town, and he feels dizzy every time he returns to it.
Over the next few days, Shuichi’s father’s strange behavior escalates as he becomes increasingly obsessed with spirals. He commissions Kirie’s father, Yasuo, a potter, to make him a bowl with a spiral pattern to add to his collection of spirals. He stirs both his soup and his bathwater to make a whirlpool. After his wife, Yukie, throws away his spiral collection in a bid to rid him of the obsession, Mr. Saito (who lacks a canonical given name in the manga) begins making spirals with parts of his body, starting with rolling his eyes separately from each other. His obsession eventually leads to his demise, as he contorts his entire person into a spiral inside a large drum. At Mr. Saito’s funeral, smoke from the crematorium rises into the form of a spiral and settles into Dragonfly Pond, a small body of water encircled by the town.
The curse of the spiral then spreads to Yukie. Unlike her husband, who was fascinated by spirals, Yukie is horrified by them. In each spiral, she sees her husband telling her to join him. She attempts to eliminate all spirals around her, including those that are a part of her body. After she succumbs to injuries inflicted in an attempt to rid herself of the spiral-shaped cochleas in her ears, the smoke from the crematorium once again drifts into a spiral.
Bizarre events become more frequent as the curse spreads. Many residents of Kurouzu-cho meet their ends while others are turned into human-sized snails. Several typhoons strike the town before being absorbed into Dragonfly Pond. The air pressure emanating from the pond becomes so great that any fast movement or loud noise made by the residents creates localized whirlwinds. People cram into old row houses, which are the only structures able to withstand the typhoons and whirlwinds. Food becomes scarce, and some turn to eating their compatriots-turned-snails. After her brother Mitsuo begins to turn into a snail, Kirie finally agrees to leave Kurouzu-cho. She leaves with Shuichi, Mitsuo, and Chie, a reporter who had come to report on events in the town. As they begin their journey through the surrounding mountains, Kirie and her companions notice that the townsfolk are expanding the row houses.
Their attempt to escape is thwarted when all the paths they follow lead in circles and eventually bring them back to Kurouzu-cho. Years have somehow passed as Kirie and the others wandered in the mountains, and the row houses have now been expanded and combined into a giant spiral. The bodies of the residents inside have twisted and curled like the tendrils of a creeping plant, and the townspeople have become enmeshed with one another. After Chie is absorbed into the mass, Shuichi and Kirie look for the latter’s parents. At the inner end of the row houses, they find a spiral staircase leading into the bottom of what used to be Dragonfly Pond. They find a twisting city at the bottom of the staircase, along with the corpses of Kirie’s parents. Shuichi realizes that the spiral around them periodically recurs and envelops those who live in Kurouzu-cho. Kirie and Shuichi declare that neither of them can go on and become intertwined as they are wrapped within the spiral.
Reception and adaptations
Uzumaki is frequently described as Ito Junji’s magnum opus. Critics have praised its eerie art style, along with its blend of body- and cosmic-horror. In 2003 its English adaptation was nominated for a Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for best U.S. edition of foreign material. It has been featured on a number of recommendation lists, including IGN’s 2016 list of top horror manga and the Young Adult Library Services Association’s top-10 list of “great graphic novels for teens.”
In 2000, shortly after the manga was published, Uzumaki spawned three adaptations. Two Uzumaki-related video games were released for the WonderSwan, a handheld console made by Bandai and released only in Japan. The first, called Uzumaki: Denshi Kaiki Hen, was a visual novel that took players through the events of the Uzumaki manga. The second, Uzumaki: Noroi Simulation allowed the player to take on the role of the spiral curse and attempt to infect all of Kurouzu-cho. The third Uzumaki adaptation in 2000 was a live-action film. The film adaptation was directed by Higuchi Akihiro under the name Higuchinsky. Although critics found some things to praise about the movie, notably the cinematography and Hatsune Eriko’s performance as Kirie, critical response to the film was lackluster. A number of critics thought that the film was more comical than scary, with some suggesting that live-action was simply the wrong medium for the story.
At Crunchyroll Expo 2019 television network Adult Swim announced an upcoming animated adaptation of Uzumaki. The miniseries would consist of four episodes and was set to air in 2020. Production was delayed three times due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges of animating Ito’s detailed drawings. The first episode aired on Adult Swim on September 28, 2024.