"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

#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”

 

movies and tv

The Lychee Road

On the plane to Taiwan, the entertainment selection was limited but this caught my eye: it’s a 2025 movie, labelled as historical comedy, in which a Tang Dynasty minor official is framed by his colleagues into performing an impossible task: delivering fresh lychees from a

Read More »
architecture, engineering and construction

Fuorisalone 2026

I am not ready. I am so not ready. I feel like I just got back from Taiwan (which I did), Rome in between, and now I must prepare to depart for Denmark and I am so not ready for the Design Week. Still, the

Read More »
books and literature

Project Hail Mary

I really wanted to like this book, having liked The Martian and… well, we don’t talk about Project Artemis. I enjoyed the movie just fine, and I hoped the book would fix some oversimplifications and convenient occurrences depicted there. Also, the main character is a

Read More »
Share on LinkedIn
Throw on Reddit
Roll on Tumblr
Mail it
No Comments

Post A Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

RELATED POSTS

The Lychee Road

On the plane to Taiwan, the entertainment selection was limited but this caught my eye: it’s a 2025 movie, labelled as historical comedy, in which a Tang Dynasty minor official is framed by his colleagues into performing an impossible task: delivering fresh lychees from a

Read More

Fuorisalone 2026

I am not ready. I am so not ready. I feel like I just got back from Taiwan (which I did), Rome in between, and now I must prepare to depart for Denmark and I am so not ready for the Design Week. Still, the

Read More

Project Hail Mary

I really wanted to like this book, having liked The Martian and… well, we don’t talk about Project Artemis. I enjoyed the movie just fine, and I hoped the book would fix some oversimplifications and convenient occurrences depicted there. Also, the main character is a

Read More