REVIEW: Uzumaki (manga) by Junji Ito, translation by Yuji Oniki

Uzumaki is a horror manga. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Kirie, a high school girl, is the primary narrator of Uzumaki. Through a variety of connected stories, she describes how her hometown of Kurouzu-cho gradually becomes completely contaminated by spirals. It all starts with her boyfriend Shuichi's father, whose obsession with spirals begins to twist his body and mind. Then Shuichi's mother is affected, then one of Kirie's classmates, and then her own father. It gradually spreads to more and more people, and affects more and more aspects of their lives. 

The premise doesn't really sound like much, but Ito's artwork elevates it to something truly horrific. Aside from a few instances here and there that I, for some reason, found more amusing than horrific (the spiraled hair incident, for example), Ito somehow manages to transform something simple and ordinary into an infinitely deep well of dread.

After reading Junji Ito's Cat Diary, I decided that I should probably try one of his horror works (I have vague memories of being scarred by Ito's The Enigma of Amigara Fault, but I'm not sure if I've ever read the full thing). Uzumaki seemed like a good place to start.

The deluxe edition I read included several color pages, and I found that those reminded me a lot of Edvard Munch's The Scream. Ito's highly detailed artwork was especially effective at conveying the horror of the spirals in this work - by the end, they were everywhere. 

There wasn't a lot of what I'd call gore in this (an incident with one girl's eye, and the story about the pregnant ladies), but the great gobs of body horror sometimes made it hard to remember that. Characters were physically affected by the spirals - initially, it was most visible in their eyes, which Ito drew practically popping out of characters' heads, but later it began affecting people's whole bodies. In order to further enhance the horror, Ito tied in mushrooms, snails, and more.

The two stories that gave me the most chills were the first one, about Shuichi's father, and the one about the pregnant women (what can I say, pregnancy horror is effective on me).