Kurozu-cho, a fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is haunted by a recurring pattern: a spiral manifesting itself in increasingly terrifying ways. In this third and final volume, the town is cut off from the outside by devastating hurricanes. Kirie, her boyfriend Shuichi, and the other desperate survivors must face the impending horror. The movie version of Uzumaki will soon be released in the U.S.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Junji Ito debuted as a horror manga artist in 1987 with the first story in his successful Tomie series. Uzumaki, drawn from 1998 to 1999, was adapted into a live-action movie, which has been released in America by Viz Films and Tidepoint Pictures. It's influences include the classic manga artists Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino, as well as authors Yasutaka Tsutsui and H.P. Lovecraft. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Never Trust a Town With Row Housing,
By TastyBabySyndrome "Matthew Lewis, author of M... ("Daddy Dagon's Daycare" - Proud Sponsor of the Little Tendril Baseball Team, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Uzumaki, Volume 3 (Vol 3) (Paperback)
Jungi Ito has taken lessons from some of the best creative minds in the horror business and has meshed them into his own formations, fashioning something that can be dreadfully fantastic when he puts his mind to it. His inks seem to drip imagery, capturing expressions in black-and-white frames that could be valued at well over the thousand word cliche. I say that because he seems to understand how pulp horror works and how images can be placed together to tell a story of woe, letting him take things to the point that I find myself picking up everything he releases. And he simply gets better with time. Flesh-Colored Horror, Tomie, and the newer Gyo series have all showcased his abilities to craft horror themes, manifesting oddities existing within the natural world and the unnatural and also showing how emotions - especially love - sometimes comes with curses of its own. That said, none of these truly does Ito justice like the three Uzumaki books have done.Trying to compress and overview the themes running rampant in these books, Uzumaki is the tale of the town Kurozu-cho as it finds itself under the thumb of a mysterious curse. Here, spirals seem to appear and to bring madness with them, working through the population in a number of odd to just plain disturbing fashions. It began to manifest in the first book as obsession leading to bizarre happenings and then quickly polluted the town with weird manifestations that seemed to come slowly at first. Then, suddenly, it was like the town was under siege by the curse of spiral, leaving tragedy at every turn. Still, it all seemed to leave a question mark in the interactions at first. Until the third book these things all seemed to be connected in only the main characters and to the town, with the events seemingly leading to something but the "what" in that still a mystery. In this installment, however, the answer to that mystery comes to fruition in a tale that is very much like those names that Ito claims as inspiration, reminding me of something that a Lovecraft might mesh words on. And that revelation, the lofty goal outdoing some easy script, is superb. While I would add that there are a couple of tales within the book that didn't do that much for me, the end result of the stories all coming together and leaving no one unscathed was beautiful. Seeing that the town wasn't merely being touched by the hands of something that could be easily comprehended in one frame, that the hands of misfortune and fate were framing the groundwork for something stellar, illustrated why Jungi Ito is a creator that I've stuck with through all the pictures he's framed. I would get into it with more detail, too, but that might give away some portion of the prize. So, I'll instead say that I honestly couldn't wait to get my hands on this and am glad, in the most morbid of fashions, to see what has transpired. Because of this, I'll never trust a person that eats snails, that crafts clay pots, or that collects spirals again!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Twisted" is not inappropriate...,
By
This review is from: Uzumaki, Volume 3 (Vol 3) (Paperback)
First off, the rating: it's a composite of all three volumes, as this appears to be an entry for all three. The first and the third are spellbinding, but the second volume tends to get lost (especially in the hospital plot, which doesn't seem to really fit into the story). Uzumaki is by and large one of the most random bits of writing that I've ever seen, and yet scene to scene it all manages to mostly hang together. Kurozu-cho's descent into collective madness is shown in vignettes -- the girl with the scar on her forehead, the heroine's battle with her hair, the snail people -- and where it hangs together it is thoroughly engrossing. And I say this as someone who has never been a horror fan. The madness of the story shows in the moral detachment of many of the supporting characters -- as the spiral's influence gradually consumes the town, a creeping complacence makes the unthinkable real. Normal human beings become cannibals in several chapters. The very fabric of reality is twisted into spirals and helices, and ultimately it seems even the heroine herself succumbs. This is horror for a different crowd -- not the camp of Dracula, the cynicism of Scream, or the cerebral creepiness of Blair Witch, but a patchwork of dementia and shattered reality of a type that perhaps only Stephen King or certain SF authors even come close to, a type that lurks in supermarket tabloids and folktales but seldom seen outside of its context. Parts of it relate to postapocalyptic movies like Mad Max or Threads, and other parts freakshow exploitation horror, but only in Uzumaki does this find itself in its pure, unmoderated form. Like the spiral, it will draw you in.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The first two volumes were child's play...,
By Kit (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Uzumaki, Volume 3 (Vol 3) (Paperback)
The insanity and utter chaos found in the third and final act of the Uzumaki saga makes everything that had came before it seem completely rational and mundane. Everything is thrown out the window and the level of surrealism is set on an all time high.
"The House" starts us off an inevitable path of delirium as we find out that the hurricane that hit Kurozu-cho in volume 2 did much more damage than expected. The weird sores -> horns transformation also seemed like a subtle jab from Ito to another one of his successful creations (overseas, at least), Souichi. "Butterflies" introduces Chie, a reporter from another town -- and it is here we learn that the spirals have held the town prisoner -- and no one's going anywhere anytime soon. "Chaos" is exactly what it implies -- the spirals have made the townspeople nearly insane, and the return of the snail people (in however minor fashion) doesn't help. "Erosion" throws more gullible souls into the mix as well as reinjecting another one of the spiral infections from volume 1 -- this time, its victims are the meshed up townspeople. In "Escape", Kirie, Chie, Shuichi, and Mitsuo tries to well, escape, from the clutches of the spirals by the path on the hillside, and it's here we find out that even reality and time themselves aren't immune from the twisted wrath of the uzumaki; for what seemed like days to Kirie, Chie, and Shuichi were really months and years to everyone else. "The Labyrinth" slowly opens the truth behind the curse. At this point, Kurozu-cho has completely lost everything that substantiates sanity and and is but a spiral itself. "Completion" is the final chapter of this masterpiece, and in the end, we're left spiraling with little comprehension of exactly what we have seen, felt, and thought -- and that's exactly how things should be. "Galaxies" is a lost chapter that seems to have been written for volume 1, and shows that the spirals can reach even as far as another galaxy -- or perhaps vice versa. Upon reading this chapter, I can definitely see why it was excluded from the first volume of the collection. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly worthy of being a part of the Uzumaki saga, but the subject and flow of the story is, unfortunately, out of sync with volume 1. Glad to see that it was included here instead, as it works much better with volume 3's overall level of madness. Yet another funny "Afterward" moment from Junji Ito. The man seriously needs to try his hands on comedy.
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