Uzumaki’s manga is full of truly disturbing moments.
One of the most famous scenes of this manga
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Junji Ito is one of the most famous and respected mangakas among fans of Japanese horror. This is due to the numerous stories he has created, which have been characterized by the use of body horror and by taking his protagonists to situations as uncomfortable as they are far from any kind of logic.
Uzumaki is probably his most popular work so far, and it has gained great notoriety in recent weeks due to its ambitious anime adaptation, which aims to be one of the best of the year and a must-read for fans of the seinen genre and horror stories. To pay tribute to the work and the popular mangaka, we have decided to recall some of the darkest and most surprising moments that can be found in its twisted plot.
The following lines contain spoilers for the Uzumaki manga.
The Death of Mr. Saito (Chapter 1)
Mr. Saito’s death traumatized many Uzumaki readers.
In the first chapter of Uzumaki we can find surprises as disturbing as the death of Mr. Saito, who was found by his wife and his son Shuichi lifeless inside his bathtub, turned into a human spiral. The impact increases even more if we take into account that throughout the chapter we were shown that, in his last days, Mr. Saito experienced a disconcerting and sickly fixation with spirals.
Mr. Saito’s death is one of the most brilliant moments of Uzumaki, and it gave way to a series of inexplicable phenomena that Kirie Goshima and the rest of the characters began to experience. On the other hand, the smoke that was formed when Mr. Saito’s corpse was burned ended up creating a gigantic spiral in the sky that impressed every inhabitant of the town.
Katayama slowly transforms into a snail (Chapter 8)
Katayama was turned into a snail due to the curse of the spirals
The eighth chapter of Uzumaki is considered one of the best and is also one of the most remembered among fans for introducing the caracolenses, also known as ‘snail people’. These people, chosen for their slow movements, are turned into giant snails due to the influence of the curse that was already slowly taking over the town.
Although the Caracolenses make their appearance on several occasions throughout the plot, the most shocking moment they left us was starred by Katayama, a classmate of Kirie who received all kinds of insults from several of his classmates and whom we saw gradually lose his human form due to this transformation, provoking a curious mix of sensations in the reader.
The curse of the spirals also controls the passage of time (Chapter 18)
Another strange phenomenon caused by the curse
Throughout Uzumaki’s story we discover that the spirals are capable of modifying and twisting the bodies of their victims, turning people into snails and even taking over buildings such as the Kurouzu Lighthouse, whose light became a real danger to Kirie and her neighbors due to its hypnotic powers. However, the situation reached a larger scale when it is revealed that the curse also turns hours into years.
This is evidenced in a dialogue that occurs in chapter 18. The now emaciated Mr. Tanizaki, who is in charge of removing the bodies that pile up in the streets of the town, is surprised to see that our people have not changed at all in all these years, when in reality they were only a few hours away from Kurouzu. In this way, the readers discover that the passage of time began to flow much faster within the town because of the spirals.
The ruins beneath the village of Kurouzu (Final chapter)
Kirie looked at these strange ruins in horror.
The last surprise left by Uzumaki’s manga was the existence of enormous spiral-shaped ruins that were beneath our protagonists and the rest of the inhabitants of Kurouzu all this time. This discovery, which inevitably reminds us of some Lovecraft stories, becomes even more disturbing when we learn that, in Shuichi’s words, these ruins seem to have a life of their own.
Underground, a huge number of people piled up, victims of the curse of the spirals. Their bodies, twisted to absurd limits, ended up becoming stone statues to eternally admire the center of the spirals that crowned this strange place.
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