“Spiral
into horror” is the tagline printed on the cover of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki,
a three-volume manga collected about the isolated town of Kurouzu-cho and its slow
destruction. Structurally, it’s an odd
story to read. The last third or so is an
explicitly connected narrative, essentially one connected story after two
thirds of the novel has been short horror stories set in Kurouzu-cho, usually
ending with the subject of the horror dying in a way that is related to the
shape of a spiral. Ito’s use of the
spiral throughout Uzumaki is to represent the existential horror of
living in an uncaring society and universe.
Kurouzu-cho is an isolated town, far from the metropolitan centers of
Japan, full of uncaring adults who will push away any sense of community and
children who learn far too early to emulate their parents. The ending of Uzumaki is nihilistic to
the extreme, the protagonists lose and the town falls into the spiral at the
center of the town. Protagonists Kirie
and Shuichi give up any chance of getting out and become formless parts of the
spiral, the town folding in on itself before the narration indicates that this
has happened before and will happen again.
It cannot be changed. It cannot
be stopped. The spiral will return. There is no hope. Included in the back of the volume is a
deleted chapter where the horror is explicitly cosmic, the spiral of the galaxy. Uzumaki is nihilist in the extreme,
life is full of pain and then you die, your entire world going with you. The ending leaves the reader empty, ultimately
the horror cannot be explained. This is
cosmic horror where the cosmic horror comes directly from the Earth and those
around them. The beginning of the story
is a standard, if well written horror story of a family becoming obsessed with
a spiral before it drives them to mutilation and suicide. It’s psychological and creates a mission statement
for Uzumaki while standing on its own as a complete story.
As is
typical for manga, Ito is writing, drawing, and lettering Uzumaki,
however the lettering is redone for the English edition with the translation coming
from Yuji Oniki. The translation does
indicate the style is quite clipped, dialogue and narration is quite
clipped. There is this sense that the
characters are being continually cut off, adding to the isolating effect of the
horror. Ito’s strongest suit is the
art. Uzumaki is a tale of body
horror, the spiral becoming the symbol of twisting the human form into
something inhuman. There are two
particular installments of the series that bring the body horror to its most gruesome. First is “The Snail”, the tale of a boy who
only comes to school when it rains, before not coming all together. He gets slower, more hunched over, before
transforming into a giant snail. It’s one
of the simpler pieces of horror, though becoming a snail seems to spread and
eventually plays into becoming a food source when the town is completely falling
apart. Ito masters the use of the still
image, the horror in the chapter coming from very specifically avoiding the sue
of motion in the art. This is particularly
tricky to pull off, the best art in this type of storytelling relies on implied
motion that is absent here. Second is “The
Umbilical Cord” which plays upon the fears of childbirth and the reduction of
women into being incubators for children.
There is also a parasitic fungus that represents the spiral and the
perversion of the children, taking certain visual cues from Village of the
Damned and Rosemary’s Baby for inspiration.
Overall,
Junji Ito’s horror is the horror in the pointlessness. There is an underlying sense of isolation being
what kills, the outsiders are subjected to the terror before the universe peels
back what makes people exist. Uzumaki
excels at body horror because the story’s depth comes from simplicity. The intention is to leave the reader with
this pit of hopelessness as a warning for the cycles of terror that befall
humanity. And in that deep despair the
reader has to reach inside themselves to find some sort of hope and that’s what
makes it beautiful, but only as a complete picture. 9/10.
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