Junji Ito’s manga UZUMAKI is a weird and wild horror story about a Japanese town plagued by the “spiral curse,” which begins to spread until it threatens to devour everything. I absolutely loved the art, original story, and haunting strangeness of it.
The manga is a collection of series of interconnected stories about Kirie Goshima, a teenage girl whose boyfriend, Shuichi Saito, believes their town is haunted by uzumaki, the spiral and mesmerizing secret shape of the world. Time after time, she sees people become obsessed or infected by spirals. As the incidents mount, the spirals grow until becoming a whirlpool threatening to consume everything.
In some ways, the story reminded me of PI, a 1998 film about a man who discovers a number that is one of the names of God and drives him to the brink of madness. UZUMAKI has the same level of originality and strangeness, though it takes its concept much farther, straight to an unflinching, very satisfying finish.
If you like graphic novels/manga and horror (or anything just plain weird), check out UZUMAKI. It’s a lot of fun.
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