#Spooktober 18 – Uzumaki

I bought this manga at The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles right before my long travel back to Italy, and I have to be thankful I can’t sleep on airplanes, because this would have prevented me from doing that anyway.

Kurouzu-cho is a small town in Japan, constantly wrapped in fog, and it’s cursed.
Cursed by what?
Spirals.
Yeah, you heard me right.
People there are literally obsessed with that shape, which seems to emerge at random from the fabrics of reality. The hypnotic pattern has the power of revealing the secret of how the world works, and it’s too much for people to bear: some go insane in chasing the pattern, while some others die trying to escape it.

Written and illustrated by Junji Ito, it was originally published as a series and you may now find it collected in one or three volumes. Critically acclaimed, it’s now considered Ito’s masterpiece.

Index of Chapters

1. “The Spiral Obsession Part 1”
2. “The Spiral Obsession Part 2”
3. “The Scar”
4. “The Firing Effect”
5. “Twisted Souls”
6. “Medusa” (also known as “Winding Hair”);
7. “Jack-in-the-Box”
8. “The Snail”
9. “The Black Lighthouse”
10. “Mosquitoes”
11. “The Umbilical Cord”
12. “The Storm”
13. “The House”
14. “Butterflies”
15. “Chaos”
16. “Erosion”
17. “Escape”
18. “The Labyrinth”
19. “Completion”