Junji Ito’s “Uzumaki”: A Mind-Bending Journey into Lovecraftian Horror — A Review
and why you should read it!
Shapes are usually simple figures when we are introduced to them (think 2D shapes such as squares, triangles, circles, etc.). They, however, keep becoming more and more complex when you progress further (3D shapes ranging from cubes to pyramids, to helices, and so on). Spirals lie somewhere between the two kinds.
I find shapes interesting as an artist (in the most basic sense of the word: sketch artist), but hate looking at them from a mathematician’s point of view. But Ito, as a mangaka, puts shapes somewhere between the two points of view.
A careful combination of the two aspects that lay in the aforementioned middle grounds, provides us with Uzumaki.
In Kurozu-cho, a small coastal town in Japan, isolated from the outside world, lies a horrifying secret: Spirals. A man gets interested in spirals and ends up taking the whole town with him for a journey to witness the horrifyingly distorted side of the cosmos, except that it was not just the man. I am not sure how this came to an end in the manner that it did. But what I do know is that nothing was as it seemed.
Ito is a genius, both at inking Lovecraftian imagery, as well as weaving grand narratives of horror by drawing on the simplest of elements from everyday life. But how does the worldly make its way into the cosmic realm? Uzumaki begins by elevating the spiral from a mere shape to an obsession, then into the realm of the supernatural as a curse, and ends by finally taking it into the core of the cosmos itself. This gradual widening of the scope makes Ito’s creation more potent. The isolated coastal town as a setting further gives a strong impression of Kurozu-cho being something close to the Lovecraftian town of Innsmouth.
One key difference between Ito and Lovecraft, apart from the mediums used, is that Ito does not explain, but he shows. The beauty of Lovecraft lay in the fact that he describes the indescribable, forcing one’s mind into impossibility, whereas Ito induces a simple and unsettling unfamiliarity in his readers. None is more effective than the other, but Ito’s way of presentation is a breath of fresh air within the plethora of literature produced in the image of the giant that is Lovecraft. The same can be said about it as a horror manga.
The stories in Uzumaki in its entirety appear quite episodic in nature, bearing little or no relation to the episodes that precede and succeed it, but in time, they all make sense. The sense of completion that the reader receives is not of the sort that the final chapter of a mystery novel provides. It is something that comes from a feeling of connectedness to the universe portrayed. The feeling that somewhere out there, in the deepest, darkest part of the universe, there might exist something ancient, something of great power. A part of this feeling emerges from and due to the characters themselves. The characters in the manga appear more substantial than in any other works of horror that I have seen of this nature. Even the characters that appear only once in the manga, only to die or go insane or to turn into something completely expected, still assert their presence quite strongly. And so, it forces the reader to acknowledge the possibility of an inescapable cosmic power existing.
Uzumaki is only my first exposure to Junji Ito’s work, but I found it intriguing enough to keep returning to Ito. If you are a fan of anything remotely close to Lovecraftian horror, body horror, or of weird stories that would keep you pinned to the edge of your seat, this manga will definitely take you on a journey of a lifetime.
This essay was written by Ankit Rath.
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