Uzumaki



""This is Kurôzu-cho, where I grew up. I would like to share with you... the strange events that took place here.""

Kurôzu-cho, a small Japanese seaside village, is plagued by mysterious happenings. A man commits suicide in his own bathtub. A student's scar becomes a black hole. People start transforming into giant snails.

What do all these events have in common? The spiral. The suicidal man's body was contorted into a spiral. The student's scar became a spiral in its transformation into a black hole. The "snail people" are marked by their spiral-shaped birthmarks, which slowly transform into shells. To make matters worse, the small island town is completely cut off from the rest of the world; all ships are sunk by whirlpools, while the tunnel that leads to the outside world becomes an endless trip.

So begins the terrifying three-volume manga Uzumaki by Junji Ito (creator of The Enigma of Amigara Fault), centering upon a supposed curse placed upon the town.

Not to be confused, in any way, with the main character of Naruto. Or Spiral Energy.

A live action film adaptation exists that has a large portion of the story left out, although this is partly due to the manga still being incomplete when the movie was made.


 * Alien Geometries: Of a decidedly spirally sort.
 * And I Must Scream:
 * Apocalyptic Log:
 * Arbitrary Skepticism: Honestly, given what some people witness directly, their refusal to accept the possibility of later events falls into the "bats/ostriches" variant of Dying Like Animals.
 * Attention Whore: Sekino from "Medusa".
 * Baleful Polymorph: Some people are turned into snails... and others turn into much worse things.
 * Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Kirie was infected with the godawful, demonic spiral warts later in the story... but only on her feet. They were very small, caused no problems, and remained unseen for the entirety of her screentime before they disappeared completely.
 * Also played straight with Kirie's burns, which are severe enough to have her hospitalized, yet mostly miss her face and heal without leaving scars.
 * Likewise, we only hear about her in vague narration, while everyone else is depicted in full, disgusting detail.
 * Beneath the Earth: The final chapter.
 * Bittersweet Ending: The Star-Crossed Lovers chapter. It says a lot that this is considered the high point of the manga.
 * Body Horror: Like you wouldn't believe -- particularly freaky are the after the town succumbs to the curse.
 * Campbell Country: Kurôzu-cho is an isolated village by the sea.
 * The Cassandra: Shuichi. The problem is that he mostly only talks to Kirie. Kirie also ends up unheeded when she's trying to alert everyone about the.
 * Catch Phrase: Shuichi. Cryptic words with "mad" on them.
 * Pretty much every character will at some point utter the words "That sound! It just pierces through my ears!"
 * Chekhov's Gun: In "Mosquitoes", Keiko's cloth-wrapped item. The same chapter has.
 * Cosmic Horror Story
 * Deus Ex Machina: This is how Kirie escapes a few dangers--for instance, random passersby walk in and distract the monster in chapter 11, and a storm blows a branch that impales her assailant in chapter 13.
 * Downer Ending: It gets worse if you remember from the beginning of the series that
 * Eat the Dog
 * Enfant Terrible: The babies born to the bloodsucking pregnant women have some terrible tricks of their own.
 * Also, the nasty children from the latter chapters. According to citizens, half of the structural damage is due to their pranks, exploiting the wind phenomenon.
 * Everything's Better With Spinni--NO, IT ISN'T.
 * Eyes Are Unbreakable:
 * Face Heel Turn:
 * Fate Worse Than Death: The eventual fate of
 * Foreshadowing: Chapter 3 foreshadows
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar: In Chapter 13, the local Peeping Tom
 * Gonk: The original snail-man, even before his transformation.
 * Grotesque Gallery
 * Heroic BSOD: Shuichi, very gradually.
 * I Know Mortal Kombat: Jack-in-the-Box's stuntman skills.
 * Idiot Ball: Even on a normal level, Kirie. A lot. Why would anyone bring their boyfriend anywhere near a girl who is known for seducing frickin' everyone? To be fair, Kirie was hesitant to and
 * On a more idiotic level, Okada from chapter 3. Granted, she was previously established as being supernaturally attractive.
 * Important Haircut: Kirie is short-haired for more than half the tale after the chapter that shows the first time the spirals affected her directly, turning her from The Scully into a believer.
 * It Got Worse: The first two chapters feature the female lead's boyfriend's parents deaths. The father becomes obsessed with spirals, killing himself by turning into a giant spiral. The mother by contrast, becomes deathly afraid of spirals, hallucinating her husband's body is in each one, and cutting off her own fingers tips, to get rid of the spirals. Then she finds out about the spiral in the inner ear... When they're cremated, their ashes turn into spirals with an image of their screaming face. It STILL gets worse. Much worse.
 * Karmic Transformation: Tsubara in the "Snail" chapter.
 * Kill'Em All
 * Killed Off for Real:
 * Laser-Guided Karma: After a bully, Tsubara, pokes fun at (figuratively and literally) the first, he ends up . Later, the teacher of the class destroys a 'nest' of their eggs and suffers the same fate. Needless to say, it's probably apparent that nobody else in the class did anything to the.
 * Live Action Adaptation: A live-action movie was made in 2000.
 * Ludd Was Right: By the last chapters, any semblance of modern society in the village has all but vanished.
 * Monster Clown:
 * Non-Actor Vehicle: Fhi Fan, who played Shuichi in the movie, was a Thai model who never acted before or ever again after this part.
 * Oh Crap:, upon realizing
 * Only Sane Man: Shuichi, which quickly reaches the point of absurdity. Then again, he along with a few other people had every single opportunity to just get out of town before things really started going to hell.
 * Tanizaki as well in the end.
 * Our Vampires Are Different: After getting bitten by mosquitoes, pregnant women start sucking people's blood. Drills are utilized.
 * Prehensile Hair: Kirie's hair becomes this in the Medusa chapter. Overlaps.
 * Idiot Hair: They try to comb it down at first - it doesn't stick.
 * Blessed with Suck: It has a mind of its own and very much wants to live. Also, it.
 * Empathic Weapon: Kinda. See above.
 * Charm Person: Has a hypnotic effect.
 * Important Haircut: Shuichi nearly dies from the attempt, and Kirie keeps her hair short from that point onwards (see pic above).
 * Mythology Gag: Medusa has some similarities to the Hair chapter from Junji Ito's Tomie.
 * Psychological Horror
 * Remix Comic: A fan edit of the first two chapters, entitled Gorgo the Slum Queen, was recently released on 4chan, and turns the nightmarish atmosphere into Nightmare Retardant. Can be found here.
 * Room Full of Crazy: The collection of spirals in the first chapter.
 * Shoot the Shaggy Dog
 * Stalker with a Crush: A typhoon and a Jack In The Box. And Wakabayashi, however briefly.
 * Azani Kurotani becomes this when Shuichi rejects her. For context, she has a moon shaped scar on her forhead, which seems to have the uncanny ability to draw in any guy, whether she likes them or not. As a result a rumor was spread about her that she would seduce men and throw them away. Kirie reluctantly introduces Azani to Shuchi, who is Kirie's boyfriend. Where most boys reacted to her scar with fascination and feel drawn to her, Shuichi reacts in fear, because the scar has slowly turned into a spiral. As a result of the rejection, Azani becomes obsessed with Shuichi and tries to get him to accept her like the other boys. However he rebuffs her and even explains why. Despite seeing the spiral herself, she's determined to steal him from Kirie. When Kirie demands she leave Shuichi alone, it only strengthens her resolve. Her spiral scar going from a skin deep image to a spiral shaped dent in her forehead. In one last attempt to steal him, Azani uses Okada, a boy who's drawn to her through her scar to lure him out.
 * Star-Crossed Lovers: The two kids in the Twisted Souls chapter.
 * Stupidity-Inducing Attack: It's strongly implied that the town is exerting a certain measure of mental influence on its inhabitants in order to make them easier prey, which would certainly explain many of the more... questionable decisions that crop up throughout the story.
 * Surreal Horror
 * Too Dumb to Live: All the named characters stay in town way past the point it's clear they should leave. It's mentioned that a few people bugged out when the first inexplicable deaths occurred, leaving empty houses for those remaining whose homes have been smashed.
 * Kirie deserves a special mention. Maybe it was the Spirals' hypnotizing power, but she seems to forget all the crazy shit that happens each subsequent chapter. She fails to not only heed Shuichi's warnings every time he appears, but she writes him off each time as "acting strange lately".
 * It's WORSE than that. In later chapters she thinks that 'maybe this is because of the Spiral...' but doesn't do a thing about it!
 * Consider, however, that when people were cremated in other towns had their ashes sucked into the Dragonfly pond...escaping might not have been an option. Especially considering the Year Inside, Hour Outside nature of the place in later chapters (see below).
 * Town with a Dark Secret: Does it ever.
 * Weaksauce Weakness: How does Kirie survive the rabid mob of drill-wielding bloodthirsty women?
 * Wham! Episode: "The House".
 * What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The Snail People, milked for every bit of Squick possible.
 * With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: The Dragonfly Gang.
 * Yank the Dog's Chain: Rescue boats are sunk by sudden whirlpools.
 * Year Inside, Hour Outside:
 * Your Head Asplode: At the end of the lost chapter "Galaxies,".
 * Zerg Rush: The row house survivors have been turned into a tangled mess tied together and as a result collectively work together regarding various things. Most prominently in Chapter 16 when they used the ruins of the town to build an extension of the Rowhouse to make more room for them. In Chapter 18 they unknowingly do this to
 * Yank the Dog's Chain: Rescue boats are sunk by sudden whirlpools.
 * Year Inside, Hour Outside:
 * Your Head Asplode: At the end of the lost chapter "Galaxies,".
 * Zerg Rush: The row house survivors have been turned into a tangled mess tied together and as a result collectively work together regarding various things. Most prominently in Chapter 16 when they used the ruins of the town to build an extension of the Rowhouse to make more room for them. In Chapter 18 they unknowingly do this to