A sleepy town on the coast of Japan is under quiet, deadly siege, not by a person or group but by a primeval spiral shape whose victims include both parents of Shuichi Saito. In this second volume of the saga, Shuichi’s girlfriend Kirie becomes further involved in the town’s terrible secret when schoolmates start turning up as horrible human snails and something unspeakable is discovered within the walls of the local hospital.
Junji Itō (Japanese: 伊藤潤二, Ito Junji) is a Japanese cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his horror manga. Ito was born in Gifu Prefecture, Japan in 1963. He was inspired to make art from a young age by his older sister's drawing and Kazuo Umezu's horror comics. Until the early 1990s he worked as a dental technician, while making comics as a side job. By the time he turned into a full time mangaka, Ito was already an acclaimed horror artists. His comics are celebrated for their finely depicted body horrors, while also retaining some elements of psychological horror and erotism. Although he mostly produces short stories, Ito is best known for his longer comic series: Tomie (1987-2000), about a beautiful high school girl who inspires her admirers to commit atrocities; Uzumaki (1998-1999), set in a town cursed with spiral patterns; Gyo (2001-2002), featuring a horde of metal-legged undead fishes. Tomie and Uzumaki in particular have been adapted multiple times in live-action and animation.
Leave it to Junji Ito to take some of the most insignificant things that we take for granted and enlarge them into things to avoid with dread and disgust!
this marks my second tango with ito, and i’m starting to realize that the more of him i read, the more enamoured i become.
or, one might say… the more hypnotic i find his work.
꩜ Jack in the Box men just won’t quit! death won’t stop a man from harassing you, no sir! he’ll just claw his way out of his coffin and bounce around on a spine-turned-spring until you admit that that dick pic he sent you three years ago was a good one!
꩜ The Snail kylie jenner wants to know what lip fillers katayama’s been using (but only if turning-into-a-mollusk-person is not a side effect)
also at one point someone calls katayama, who is very slow, you glacial fuck! and i would be lying if i said that i’m not immediately going to use this on my brother when he takes too long in the shower.
꩜ The Black Lighthouse little brothers are the worst! always getting you to chase them into spiral-shaped lighthouses that try to incinerate you!
꩜ Mosquitoes pregnant women are rife with psychotic body horror potential, and this chapter did not disappoint.
꩜ The Umbilical Cord PROOF THAT MUSHROOMS ARE ACTUALLY THE WORST.
꩜ The Storm once again we are privy to the lengths to which [even non-humans] will go to possess a woman. IT IS FRANKLY STALKERISH AND OBSESSIVE. this typhoon needs to go to therapy and reflect on its violent attachment style!
this chapter was like 80% sound effects and still so good.
Volumen mucho mas tétrico que el primero, el mejor relato para mí el de los insectos, espeluznante. Valoración: 8/10 Sinopsis: Kirie Goshima ha sido testigo de una espiral de horror que poco a poco ha cubierto su vida y la de todo su pueblo, pero aun ante lo que vive día tras día ya no tiene fuerzas para huir. Tras la fascinación espiral, una tétrica broma llega hasta la tumba ¡y vuelve!, al tiempo que el pueblo infecta a los vecinos de distintas formas, transformándolos en espirales, impidiéndoles avanzar, mutando la más pura esperanza humana en grotescas aberraciones que buscan volver al origen, a su centro… # 9. Una saga que te de mucha pereza empezar/continuar. Reto literario lecturas pendientes 2023.
After the incident at the end of volume one, Kirie has her hair short - and who could blame her. We follow her and a number of her town's residents while the spiral keeps turning more and more lives into a horror freak show.
I was very impressed with the second issue as it tackled both bullying and homosexuality (the latter as a stigma). To so subtly incorporate this in a horror comic can't be easy but it was brilliantly done. For some reason, the lighthouse issue, or at least one of the first images in it, reminded me of "Nuit Etoilée" (Starry Night) by van Gogh. Oh, and that spin in vampirism was quite unsettling as well.
The art, except for at the very beginning (kind of like a foreword) was again black-and-white, just the way I've come to like it. It really does intensify the creep-factor of this story in my opinion. People always say that Japanese horror movies are far more spooky than Western ones and after reading this manga, I can definitely believe it, because it's also much more frightening and unsettling than any other I've read so far (these others have all been by Western writers/artists). This is definitely on a whole different level (although I still prefer Western art styles). Nevertheless, I still wonder ... why not just physically leave town?! Why does everybody stay?! Just one of the as-yet unanswered questions, we'll see if there are answers.
The continuation of supernatural events in Kurōzu-cho caused by the spiral effects. Our main leads, Kirie and her boyfriend, Shuichi also affected by the spiral curse. They're not untouchable, you know. In volume #2, there's more fascinating yet creepy story in each chapters.
My favorite is the snail person. How disturbing it can be? A person slowly turns into a hugee snail? They're not human anymore. Also there's a mosquitoes-slash-dracula's effect happened when Kirie stayed at hospital. There's no further explanation about that case. Maybe it connected with the spiral curse? Who knows. Towards the ending, there's a weird storm keeps chasing Kirie and everything turns to spiral shit. I mean... what the heck?!
This is a totally fascinating romp through spirals. As a horror, it is episodic, but that doesn't lessen its impact. The deep strangeness coming through keeps upping the ante, and I can't decide which stories creep me out the most.
It's probably the mosquitos. Probably. My god these are good.
I completely recommend this short series for any horror fan. Even if you're not particularly into horror, I can't recommend this enough. It's like a perfect encapsulation of what makes horror so fun. :)
mister Ito’s participation inside the comics is on another level! his presence not only adds humor and irony but also more creepiness and makes the ‘adventures’ in Kurozu-Cho much enjoyable. it’s been a a fulfilling experience till now. can’t wait to see what he has in his sleeves in the next volume!
Horrific, Gory and more Insane than the first Volume!!
Uzumaki Vol 2 ups it's weird scale by a several notches this time with things getting more and more insane!
It's more of a Cause and Effect kind of plot however, Junji Ito has smartly managed to hide the reason why the Spiral is making an appearance in every insane encounter. This volume is gripping with a series of stories so weird and scary that you'd feel blessed it's not illustrated in colour!
There's the case of a people transforming into a spiral snail, A lighthouse that burn after sunset , Pregnant women turning into Vampires by the night and Babies wanting to go back into the Womb!
The central characters remain the same (and dumb again), the town remains the same (There's something fishy with the town for sure) and similarly the mystery of the spiral still remains unchanged!
1 günde hatta bir kaç saatte okuduğum ilk kitabın ardından ikinci kitapta müthiş bir hız ve heyecanla bitti. Gerçekten çok beğenerek okuyorum. Çizimler, korku unsurları, karakterler, öykülerin kurguları özgün ve hoş. Üçüncü kitaba hemen geçeceğim. Bir taraftan da bitiyor diye üzülüyorum. Manga, korku, çizgi roman severlerin kaçırmaması gerektiğini düşündüğüm bir seri.
جوجی ایتو به لیست نویسندههای مورد علاقهم خوش اومدی. شنیده بودم این مانگا راجب به مارپیچه، با خودم میگفتم چه چیزی میتونه در مورد مارپیچ ترسناک باشه، مارپیچ که ترسناک نیست، الان میفهمم، اشتباه میکردم.
فقط بدونید که این مانگا نفرینشدهست یا میخونید و دچار نفرین میشید و یا خودتون رو نجات میدید و به مطالعه کسلکننده سابقهتون برمیگردید.
پنلهای مانگا پر از سورپرایز و صحنهها و تصاویر شوکه کنندهست، جوجی ایتو واقعاً نابغهست، ترتیب پنلها استادانه بود. اگه اوزماکی میخونید هر لحظه انتظار شوکه شدن داشته باشید. نمیگم که جوجی ایتو به اندازه میورا تو آرت خوبه ولی بعید میدونم بتونید بعضی پنلهای اوزماکی رو فراموش کنید.
فقط اینم بگم که مشخصاً شما وقتی تصمیم میگیرید بیاید سراغ وحشت کهشکانی، خلاصه بگم لاوکرافت و بقیه دوستان فعال این ساب ژانر، توقع جواب نداشته باشید. تو ژانر وحشت کهکشانی جواب مهم نیست. اگه دوست دارید تمام پاسخهای داستان جواب داده بشند، اوزماکی مانگای مناسبی برای شما نیست.
Kurouzu-cho is a small, fogbound town on the coast of Japan, and it is haunted by an unusual curse. The curse of the spiral. A reclusive young man named Shuichi Saito is the first to take notice of the spiral patterns popping up everywhere and having strange effects on people, most of them not even noticing what’s happening to them until it’s too late. No one takes Shuichi’s warnings about the horrifying delusions the spirals cause to those who become entranced by their hypnotic spell seriously, do to his past paranoia-induced ramblings that have given him the reputation of a mentally unbalanced conspiracy theorist. Not even his girlfriend takes him seriously at first. Shuichi’s father is the first of many to fall under the dangerous spell of the spiral, becoming obsessed with the whirling patterns until his obsession drives him to the brink of madness.
The story begins with Shuichi Saito trying to explain to his girlfriend that he thinks his father is being driven insane by his recently developed obsession with spirals. He collects hundreds of spiral shaped objects, hoarding them to the point of his house nearly overflowing with them. He refuses to take a bath unless he makes the water form a whirlpool before he jumps in, he even refuses to eat a bowl of soup unless his wife throws in a few spiral shaped fishcakes to please his bizzare fixation. Eventually, Shuichi’s father’s obsession with spirals becomes so extreme that he throws himself into the family pottery machine and sacrifices his life to become a human spiral. All of the bones in his body are crushed, his remains are contorted into a spiral of baggy flesh, leaving his wife and son to discover the horrifying sight of his grotesquely disfigured corpse balled up into a mess of limbs stretched beyond human capacity. The nightmare doesn’t end there. After Shuichi has his father cremated, even his ashes form a disfigured, humanoid spiral in the sky that looms over the terrified locals of Kurouzu-cho like the gaze of an all-powerful god. In that moment, everyone begins to realize that the curse of the spiral is very real.
After the tragic incident with Shuichi’s father, the spirals begin to contaminate and consume more and more victims with their hypnotic sadism. They turn school students into snails, pregnant women into bloodsucking monsters, they transform villagers' bodies into tree branch-like limbs that get tangled together when they get too close to each other, they even turn a girl’s hair into a living hypnosis wheel that can drive you insane if you look at the spiraling strands of hair for too long. The curse of the spiral is vicious and it doesn’t stop spreading until the entire island is consumed by its vengeful spell.
Before I started reading this manga, I asked myself “how can a cute and innocent thing like spirals possibly be scary?” Well, Uzumaki did a pretty great job of proving that they can be nightmarish little monstrosities. Uzumaki takes full advantage of its visual story-telling format, looking at the pages for long periods of time made me feel slightly dizzy at times, almost making me feel like I was becoming a victim of the spirals myself. It made the experience that much more surreal, being able to see the hypnotic effects the spirals have on the characters while also feeling some of their dizzying effects on my own vision. It’s a masochistic feast for the eyes, drawing you in with surreal body horror and mind-warping imagery. The paranoia, the delirious madness, the lovecraftian themes of normal, everyday people being driven insane by seemingly innocent obsessions. The scales keep getting higher, escalating from strange body disfigurement to full-on gory nightmare fuel.
If you’re a horror fan or a fan of lovecraftian themes and imagery, and you’re not all that familiar with what manga has to offer in terms of horror, Uzumaki is the best place to start. It doesn’t have a brilliant plot or deep characters with major story arcs, it’s about average, perfectly ordinary people getting drawn into something otherworldly that the human mind can’t possibly fathom without self-destructing. The story is also told in an episodic format, each chapter having its own self-contained narrative that slowly builds upon the alluring mystery and origins of the spiral curse. The ending also has that poetic lovecraftian touch of humanity being small, helpless and completely irrelevant in the face of greater things that humans can never hope to comprehend.
Due anni fa avevo prenotato in biblioteca i due volumi contenenti l'opera manga di Uzumaki, poi inspiegabilmente il secondo volume era scomparso, così da un giorno all'altro non era più presente nell'elenco, così ritirai soltanto il primo volume. Con grande delusione mi apprestai a leggere il primo volume, sapendo che sarei rimasto orfano del secondo, infatti dopo averlo finito non vedevo l'ora di concludere la storia. Fortunatamente qualche settimana fa, dopo anni a controllare quando sarebbe riapparso, ricompare come per magia e lì é scattato l'entusiasmo, finalmente avrei saputo come finiva la storia inquietante confezionata da uno dei mangaka più fantasiosi e più visionari. Purtroppo erano passati più di due anni, quindi non avevo bene a mente la storia, ma appena sfogliato e letto qualche pagine, ecco riapparirmi davanti agli occhi gli eventi già accaduti. Le 300 pagine circa di questo volume sono passate con una sequela di sentimenti di inquietudine, raccappriccio, sbalordimento e idolatria, per una storia davvero superlativa! Non bastasse, alla fine vi é la postfazione che mi ha fatto vedere o anzi ha reso in parole ciò che avevo in mente durante tutta la narrazione, con implicazioni non solo sulla capacità immaginativa e illustrativa dell'autore, ma anche con uno sbocco riflessivo sulla situazione sociale giapponese contemporanea alla stesura del manga. Capolavoro assoluto! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbol...
Najbrže čitanje ove godine ,i opet jedva čekam da kupim sledeći deo, i pomalo proklinjem svoju odluku da svedem kupovinu na minimum jer me Ito zove kao što njegove spirale zovu svoje potencijalne žrtve
The hospital arc is by far the most disgusting, traumatizing thing I've read in fiction ever. I'll certainly not be okay when it gets animated. Junji Ito's mind is a wonder.
Although the majority of the chapters follow the exact same beats, this remains some of the most bizarre body-horror stories I’ve ever seen. It’s awesome.
Just hated reading this one. It is getting just stupidly repetitive and giving me yuck feeling. Still I'm gonna read the vol 3 . This better be good or it is going to be huge disappointment.
probably an unpopular opinion, but this was the weakest volume. as i mentioned in my review of vol. 1 i enjoy my horror as a mixture of bizarre and scary. this was definitely bizarre, i'll give it that - but not that scary? this kinda crossed the line for me into just bizarre and gross, kinda shock factor stories.
we still follow kirie, and we still have the little creepy episode chapters. and don't get me wrong, i still enjoyed this volume a lot, it just wasn't my favorite.
my thoughts on the chapters (this is the only volume i'll do this for, the chapters cover many different stories and my opinions differ the most based on the chapter):
•jack-in-the-box - someone who won't take no for an answer coming back to harass you, even from beyond the grave - peak horror, if i'm being honest
•the snail - this chapter is one of the two that made me say that this book is more gross than scary. i am not very squeamish (some exceptions apply, we'll get to that soon), but i will not look at snails the same way ever again this chapter had very "gregor samsa woke up as a giant bug and he still decided to go to work" vibe and to be fair, i did find that funny
•the black lighthouse - who doesn't love some haunted, in this case by the spiral, lighthouse content (i was just at the time of reading this getting obsessed with researching lighthouses and why they're, supposedly, haunted); i loved this chapter
•mosquitoes - despite what i'll say about the next chapter, i enjoyed the creepiness of this chapter and the blood-sucking pregnant women
•the umbilical cord - this is the one officer! as i said, not very squeamish, but pregnancy and giving birth stuff? i am absolutely terrified of anything related - so this chapter just made me insanely uncomfortable to the point of my stomach hurting. maybe i should retract that this volume wasn't scary enough, this chapter scared the hell out of me, but i still stand by the fact that the grossness levels of this volume were definitely a bit too high (now if you are not absolutely terrified of the same things i am, you might find this morbidly interesting - i just felt like my insides were knotting)
•the storm - i liked this chapter a lot! i feel like it's not bringing us any new information but it definitely shows how much more unhinged things are getting, and how unpredictable and uncontrollable this curse is; i enjoyed this chapter, but it wasn't that scary in my opinion?
all in all, not a bad volume, i enjoyed a lot of the chapters as you can see, but but the "less scary" vibe in general, and that umbilical cord chapter really are the reason my rating of this volume is lower.
Birinci kitaptan daha iyi olmasını beklerken, birinci kitaptan daha saçma çıkması beni üzdü. Sürüsüyle olay yaşanıyor. Ortada bir lanet var ama ne doktorlar ne polisler ne de ülkedeki diğer kişiler bu konuyu el atmıyor. Okulda bir çocuk salyangoza dönüşüyor ve "Aaa hadi bunu okulumuzun bahçesinde besleyelim" diyorlar. 😂 Hastanede hamile kadınlar acayip bebekler doğruyor ve "Aa hadi bunları mantar yapıp yemeklere katalım" diyorlar. Üzgünüm ama tamami ile saçmalıktı. İçindeki çizimler için 2 puan verdim....
Even weirder than the first volume, if you can believe it. Clearly this is not meant for kids — why then do the characters keep on acting incredibly foolish? Why does Junji keep on stating the obvious? I doubt the third volume will answer my questions.