Week 12: Junji Ito!!!!
I'm going to review Uzumaki because it was the first and only manga that I've read by Junji Ito and I absolutlely love it. The story follows what must seem like a bizarre, absurd premise even by the standards of weird fiction. A small Japanese town is “infested by spirals.” This means spiral shapes begin to appear everywhere: blades of grass, clouds, pottery baking in a kiln, whirlpools in creeks. The story quickly becomes unnerving once townspeople begin obsessing over the spirals, such as Mr. Saito, the father of Shuichi Saito, one of the main characters. Mr. Saito commits acts like stopping in the middle of streets to watch snails for hours and stocking a room in his house dedicated to anything with a spiral shape drawn, carved, or otherwise embedded in or on it. This situation becomes even more menacing when Mr. Saito begins to distort his own body to assume spiral shapes, which leads to some truly disturbing images of the horrifying pliability of the human body, culminating in an iconically nightmarish scene that will have a profound effect on how you view personal baths. The world of Uzumaki is an ultimately dark one. This is not a feel‐good story by any means, but you will hopefully find yourself reaching a kind of catharsis or reward nevertheless.
I'm going to review Uzumaki because it was the first and only manga that I've read by Junji Ito and I absolutlely love it. The story follows what must seem like a bizarre, absurd premise even by the standards of weird fiction. A small Japanese town is “infested by spirals.” This means spiral shapes begin to appear everywhere: blades of grass, clouds, pottery baking in a kiln, whirlpools in creeks. The story quickly becomes unnerving once townspeople begin obsessing over the spirals, such as Mr. Saito, the father of Shuichi Saito, one of the main characters. Mr. Saito commits acts like stopping in the middle of streets to watch snails for hours and stocking a room in his house dedicated to anything with a spiral shape drawn, carved, or otherwise embedded in or on it. This situation becomes even more menacing when Mr. Saito begins to distort his own body to assume spiral shapes, which leads to some truly disturbing images of the horrifying pliability of the human body, culminating in an iconically nightmarish scene that will have a profound effect on how you view personal baths. The world of Uzumaki is an ultimately dark one. This is not a feel‐good story by any means, but you will hopefully find yourself reaching a kind of catharsis or reward nevertheless.
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