REVIEW: Beware of Spirals: Uzumaki, Junji Ito

Uzu­maki by Junji Ito, 2^nd edi­tion pub­lished Octo­ber 2007 by Viz Media, 208 pages. Ito is the mas­ter of manga hor­ror. Oh, yes, I’m very famil­iar with his work hav­ing read Museum of Ter­ror about a young woman men are mes­mer­ized by and who end up killing her only to have her come back to life again and again. In Uzu­maki, Ito man­ages to make a sim­ple “spi­ral” into a thing of sheer ter­ror for a small town off the coast of Japan. There are six chap­ters in this first vol­ume and the art­work and story was good enough to leave me still think­ing about it after the last page was closed.

The towns­peo­ple of Kurozu-cho have been expe­ri­enc­ing some weird and unex­plain­able events of late. The story is nar­rated by Kirie Goshima, a high school stu­dent who wit­nesses these weird and inex­plic­a­ble events with her boyfriend, Shuichi.  Shuichi feels that the town is cursed and wants to leave. He’s been agi­tated, with­drawn and depressed. He pretty much sets the eerie tone of the story lead­ing read­ers to think that some­thing just isn’t quite right here.

There have been increased whirl­winds and dirt dev­ils through­out the town. The sky has a weird spi­ral shape to it as does the ocean. Shuichi’s father has been act­ing strange, seem­ingly obsessed with spi­ral pat­terns — in every­thing. It’s an obses­sion that has kept him from work and makes him respond vio­lently towards his fam­ily when they try to inter­vene. Need­less to say, these strange events start to get really creepy with Shuichi’s father. He starts doing things that isn’t humanly pos­si­ble and even­tu­ally this causes his wife to develop a pho­bia of spi­rals that ulti­mately leads to her own self-destruction.

Ok, I know what many of you are think­ing: what could Ito do with a spi­ral to make it so scary? I was quite cyn­i­cal myself think­ing this would be a quick read that wouldn’t scare me. Wrong. It’s not so much that the art­work is bril­liantly creepy but that the author is able to psy­cho­log­i­cally get inside your head and make you believe in the bizarre. Ito does make you squirm in your seat. I know I mut­tered a “you got to be kid­ding me’” more than a cou­ple of times through­out the sto­ries and any time a panel would show the char­ac­ters being freaked out by what they saw, I dreaded turn­ing the next page to see what it was they were hor­ri­fied to see. Of course, I was rewarded with dis­turb­ing images of spi­rals that are anatom­i­cally impos­si­ble to dupli­cate on the human body.

The weak­est story for me was “The Scar” about a young girl who pur­port­edly has a scar on her fore­head that has the power to seduce men unwill­ingly. Turns out her scar is a spi­ral that mes­mer­izes young men. It wasn’t as creepy as say the first two sto­ries, “The Spi­ral Obses­sion: Parts 1 and 2″ respec­tively, which gets an A from me just from the bril­liant por­trayal of some­one who loses their mind and then self-destructs.

The power of the mind to make you believe in what is not there is truly amaz­ing and mys­te­ri­ous. Then there’s the story titled, Twisted Souls, of two star-crossed lovers whose par­ents insist on keep­ing them apart; the spi­ral seems to be por­trayed as some type of infes­ta­tion that has the power to con­trol the behav­ior of peo­ple and to make them do things that the body isn’t capa­ble of doing. In this case, the two lovers elon­gate and twist their bod­ies tightly together like two snakes and dis­ap­pear into the ocean.  Illus­tra­tions like that will give you chills and there is more of that through­out all the stories.

Next story that I enjoyed was “Medusa” which was another creepy tale where Kirie gets up close and per­sonal with the spi­rals that have been plagu­ing the town. One day her hair has grown curls that she can­not con­trol. They are spi­ral shaped and when she tries to cut her hair, the spi­rals try to stran­gle her. The story ends with a cliffhanger and I’m torn: I want to read it yet I don’t. I really don’t but I know I will.

If you enjoy hor­ror then you shouldn’t miss this one. I keep telling myself that I should really stick to all that is sweet and light but I can’t help it. I enjoy the weird and the bizarre from time to time. Ito is amaz­ing, to take some­thing so sim­ple as a spi­ral pat­tern by tak­ing that image and ter­ror­iz­ing you with it. The ter­ror is more cere­bral than any­thing else. The art­work is excel­lent but then what do I know as I am still nav­i­gat­ing this genre.  There is graphic vio­lence which is to be expected within this genre. I think I may visit this town again; it’ll have to be short-term visit as I see Ito has a third vol­ume com­ing out next month. Usually, I could only read one or two of these types of books a year, tops. Looks like I’ll make an excep­tion here. 

My grade over­all, B+ because I was sur­prised that this graphic novel sur­passed my expec­ta­tions of a silly hor­ror novel and ele­vated it to one that was down­right scary, unpre­dictable and well writ­ten. I did enjoy the after­word by the author at the end where he dis­cusses with illus­tra­tions, that had an added touch of humor in dis­cussing his research behind the “spiral.”

On it’s face, spi­rals are bor­ing and harm­less pat­terns. The fact that the author man­ages to make it men­ac­ing and ter­ror­iz­ing is what got me.  After read­ing this book, I’ll never look at a spi­ral the same way again (if I look at one at all). Thank you Ito, for that. Not.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Graphic Nov­els, Junji Ito, Spi­rals, Uzu­maki, Manga Review