Hardcover, 653 pages
English language
Published Oct. 15, 2013 by VIZ Media.
Kurôzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but by a pattern: uzumaki, the spiral, the hypnotic secret shape of the world. It manifests itself in everything from seashells and whirlpools in water to the spiral marks on people's bodies, the insane obsessions of Shuichi's father and the voice from the cochlea in our inner ear. As the madness spreads, the inhabitants of Kurôzu-cho are pulled ever deeper into a whirlpool from which there is no return!
first off I'd strongly advise against reading this (or any of Junji Ito's works, probably) if body horror is a big problem for you. that said, Uzumaki is really good! the art is amazingly done, and the slow escalation from relatively self-contained (and occasionally kind of silly) spiral-based phenomena to... the stuff that happens at the end... is just fantastic.
