Content Warning: This essay contains two manga panels from Uzumaki that may be unsettling to some readers. So if you don’t like seeing spirals or bodies/limbs in unusual shapes, I’d recommend skipping.
I can’t go on.
The final image of Uzumaki characters Kirie and Shuichi endlessly tangled up in each other as the inexplicable spiral encloses the town of Kurozu-cho. Our protagonists accept their monstrous fate. Nobody is saved. It’s not a happy ending, but I am not sad that they die. They are drawn together peacefully, unlike the graphic deaths of their friends and family members depicted in the hundreds of pages before.
Kirie’s internal dialogue brings the story to a close.
So the curse was over the same moment it began, the endless frozen moment.
I saw the Uzumaki collected volume at Barnes & Noble while holiday shopping for gifts last December. I knew I had to have the physical copy. I was compelled to buy it despite nearly maxing out my Chase credit card a few days prior. How fitting that Uzumaki reappeared to me during the first winter of the COVID-19 pandemic, when my hopelessness rivaled the unknown and unending spiral.
I don’t remember how or when I discovered Uzumaki, but I spent my teenage years trawling websites for manga “scanlations” (fan-translated manga scans). I’d download .zip files from fan-run manga sites and read them in batches, anxiously awaiting the next installment. This was in the early 2000s, and other than Viz Media publishing more popular serialized manga such as Bleach, Naruto, and Tokyo Mew Mew, I only discovered the newest (or oldest) manga and anime through online forum boards with questionable links and credibility.
Yet there was something strangely enjoyable stumbling upon works like Uzumaki without being told what it was. And how it gripped me, still grips me almost a decade later.
Like the best horror stories, Uzumaki starts off normally enough. Kirie Goshima is our main protagonist, a plain but pretty school girl who narrates the events happening in the average Japanese town of Kurozu-cho. Her boyfriend Shuichi is bespectacled and gaunt, already a bit unhinged due to the spiral infecting his family members in the first few pages. Although I spoiled the ending (sorry! but it’s been out for nearly 25 years) at the start of this essay, I won’t go into too many details regarding major stories. There’s not really a “plot” in the traditional sense, but more of a tumultuous descent. The spiral is inevitable, and we as the readers are forced to reckon with that outcome.
Uzumaki is not for the faint of heart. For those who aren’t aware of Junji Ito’s oeuvre, his work usually contains supernatural elements, violence, body horror, and societal breakdown. (If you do find yourself enjoying Uzumaki, I highly recommend reading Tomie, his debut story about an immortal beauty that preys on her victims.)
Uzumaki is not a John Carpenter slasher or a Cronenberg gorefest. Actually, I take that back, there are some pretty gross scenes in Uzumaki. But unlike the emphasis on hacking and slashing sexy coeds in American horror, the visual disgust comes from seemingly normal individuals devolve into irrational creatures of terror. The frightening abominations populate Kurozu-cho until the only “normal” survivors are Kirie and Shuichi.
My depression goes in spirals. My depression contorts my body. Eats away at my skin, my eyes, my nails. Time stops and starts at the edge of my fingertips. I once lost ten pounds in two months without trying. The yellow pills in my gut like failed rescue attempts. I awake at 2am and see myself ghoulish in the bathroom mirror. I wake up fine and feel fine but no, I am not fine. I’m spiraling. I’m spiraling, yet remain straight-spined. I am standing on solid ground and still falling.
I am not haunted by images of the spiral but I am haunted by days mimicking one another. Afghanistan. COVID-19. Political parties pointing at each other for the blame while deaths and injustices pile up. Schools and restaurants reopening and closing again. Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers rage against school boards and hospitals. What resolution is there when so many attempts circle around and around until nothing happens?
We are spirals of our own making.
Every month I bleed and do not die. It’s this female body that survives the most monstrous transformations: menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause. Everything inside me will either grow in or out of my body.
I’m not here for the Freudian approach to Ito’s work, but every human body is capable of awe and disgust. And aren’t bodies in a way, unnatural? A fetus can grow in the womb. Limbs can be amputated. Skin can be burned or stitched together. Is a teenage boy turning into a snail really any different than the oily years of puberty and hormonal rage?
A teenage girl’s hair becomes the ultimate weapon of feminine appeal. In one chapter, pregnant women feast on human blood to nourish their unborn babies. Men are driven to contort and squeeze into impossibly small spaces. The monotony of life in Kurozu-cho amplifies the body horror. How many of us haven’t wanted to tuck every part of ourselves away from the world, driven by fear, grief, or sadness? In the incalculable nadir of my depressive episodes last year, I would sink into the couch until my limbs were just couch, that the cushions were mere extensions of my personality.
Funny how Uzumaki reflects the current state of affairs. Ineffective authority figures unable to save the townspeople. Brave souls attempting to unravel the mysteries of the spiral, only to be caught up in its own conspiracy. Here we are, at the barreling descent of the inevitable and yet I’m still hoping for a different outcome.
I too grow sluggish in my attempts of projecting professionalism. I have a day job, a job for which I admit a small amount of gratitude for in these Uncertain Times, but like a snail-human abomination I drag myself through those office doors. Time unweaves itself. It’s 11am, Charlotte, Sunday, 3am, 8pm, Friday, Lynchburg, Wednesday. Last night was tomorrow and the day before. Wasn’t I here before all this? I joke and say time isn’t real, but when I sip my third cup of rose hip tea, I swear I’ve stood in the exact same spot hours/months/seconds ago with my coworker/friend/boyfriend.
I go to my job. I stay home. Repeat. I work from home. I go into the office. I pay rent. Repeat. My rent increases. I whittle away the little things that keep me standing. I save money. I spend money. My bills increase. I cook. I order McDonalds. I cook. I order taquitos from the local Mexican restaurant. I wake up. I sink into bed. I stay in bed. I wake up. Repeat. I wake up. I go to my job. I refresh. I refresh. I sink. I sink. I am spiraling and spiraling into one big shape.
I can’t go on.
I am caving into myself until I disappear. One day I will be found.
So the curse was over the same moment it began, the endless frozen moment.