Uzumaki by Junji Ito - Review

I came to awareness of Uzumaki via the coverage its live-action feature film adaptation received in Fangoria magazine. This coverage was in issue 212, dated May 2002.

A factoid that I was surprised to learn, as the live-action film was released in Japan in the year 2000. That meant there was, at the very least, a two year delay before the film's release in the United States. Memory itself is a spiral of sorts, I suppose. So it goes.

Going in I knew that the film would be indifferent to narrative structure and characterization. Because, in the article, the director pleaded for viewers to just enjoy the bizarre and disturbing imagery and not try to understand or over think it.

Yeah, good luck with that.

There was one thing about the film that both fascinated and repulsed me. The snail people. Because I suffer from mulloscophobia, you see. So I wondered and worried about just how traumatizing a viewing of Uzumaki might turn out to be for me.

Not very, as it turned out. The movie was okay and there were a few images that lodged in my memory, but overall I shrugged it off and moved on to other things.

But the name Junji Ito and the title Uzumaki stuck with me. So much so that, when I finally got around to cracking open manga and giving it a try, reading Junji Ito's work was at the top of my "I Really Need To Check This Out" list.

I am glad I did. Because Uzumaki offers up some truly unsettling and discomforting images and concepts across its six hundred or so pages.

The first half is a tad fragmented, more of an anthology and less of a long form storyline. But, as the narrative begins spiraling towards its nightmarish conclusion, characters and events are soon pulled together and funneled toward something as inescapable as it is unsettling. Something akin to the ending of an H.P. Lovecraft yarn.

It is my understanding that the live-action film version of Uzumaki was made before the manga itself had been finished, so the film's ending is quite different. To be fair, I do not even remember how it ended.

But I doubt I will forget the ending of the manga. Nor will I ever be able to shake some of its disturbing imagery. From the snail people to the pregnant women to the row houses to... well, just about everything.

Uzumaki was a fascinating and unnerving reading experience that got under my skin in the best of ways. I loved it.