The inhuman vitalism of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki
By Michael Uhall,
Indiana University East
Junji Ito’s manga Uzumaki, first published in Japan from 1998 to 1999 and translated into English in 2001 to 2002, is about the creeping contamination of the seaside town of Kurouzu-cho (黒渦町, literally “Black Vortex Town”) by spirals. Much of the volume is presented episodically, with each episode involving spiral forms or processes that manifest and propagate themselves through various media—whirlpools, tornados, social behaviours, emergency sirens, columns of crematory smoke or insects, the interiority of bodies, physical transformations, ceramics, vertigo, even hairstyles (one would be wise never to forget the etymological link between cosmetology and cosmology…). The spirals are insidious and ubiquitous; they are themselves quasi-agential. By the end of Uzumaki, they are revealed to be lurking at the very heart of nature, or perhaps even of time itself, like alien vehicles for the eternal recurrence of the strange. As a canny exploration of the ecological Gothic—that is to say, as a visual and written text that both replicates and represents nature in terms of its esoteric agencies, fearful symmetries, and inhuman aesthetics—Uzumaki reveals, inside of nature, the creepy infrastructure of reason itself. This revelation is a prime example of ecohorror. This is because Uzumaki decentres the human, repositioning the human subject not as a locus of agency and autonomy, but, rather, as subject to—indeed, as the very subject of—inhuman reason in the first place. When we participate in rational apprehension, we are subjects of a process that exceeds and precedes us, which continues unwinding inside and outside the haunted house house of the subject. Welcome to the spiral.
Things begin simply enough. High-schoolers Shuichi and Kirie, the closest thing to protagonists in the narrative, are friends. Shuichi’s father is behaving strangely. He has become obsessed with spiral forms, which he collects, increasingly to the exclusion of all else, including maintaining relationships with his family. The spirals have changed him. At first, Kirie finds this absurd, despite Shuichi’s profound concern.
However, the tragedies and transformations start adding up. Both of Shuichi’s parents die horrifically. His father becomes physically contorted into a spiral shape (the gruesome climax of his desire for metamorphosis); his mother becomes paranoid and self-destructive in the aftermath, developing a ruinous phobia of spiral shapes. Her aversion goes poorly, after she realises that spirals are everywhere: in one’s fingerprints, in one’s ears. After all, being abstract geometric forms, spirals run through all of nature like wildfire—Fibonacci numbers, the golden ratio, and so on—as if actively (almost intentionally) organising everything at some fundamental level. Here, the philosophy of nature itself is revealed as inflected by the ecological Gothic; the aesthetics and infrastructure of nature, on its own terms, are Gothic to the core. Consider Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland’s (2019) characterisation of the ecological Gothic as a category of apprehehension, as ‘a way of interrogating and interpreting the intriguing darkness in our increasingly troubled relationship to and representations of the more-than-human world’ (11). One could easily imagine tracking arcane cults, dedicated to spiral gods, carrying their doctrines through the winding coils of history itself, esoteric gangs of mad black Pythagoreans, Mayan time priests, deranged Hegelians, slavering devotees of geometrical Yog-Sothothery…
Figures 3 & 4: From Junji Ito, Uzumaki (San Francisco: Viz Media, 2013)
Soon, the spirals—or, perhaps more accurately, the very underlying processes of spiralisation—start infiltrating everything and everyone. The spirals make themselves manifest, at all scales, from the double helix of the DNA inside us to the very architecture of our galaxy. In this, the spirals invade and break apart the conventional structures of human experience and perception, cracking open the finite shells of mind and body, introducing weird new dialectics to the phenomenological flesh of existence. What could be more Gothic, ultimately, than discovering the whole universe is a kind of haunted castle, darkly looming in the black astral void, penetrated and traversed by abstract and completely inhuman dynamics?
The behaviours of the residents of Kurouzu-cho change, and so do their bodies. The very structure of social relations becomes a vicious spiral, with some residents turning into grotesque, distorted snailfolk and other residents hunting them for food and for sport as the order of things breaks down. The great carnival awakens. No—it is not breaking down, but regressing, first, and then changing, pushing forward through such cryptic involutions as to open up new horizons and material possibilities of being. What happens to animal bodies, to human cultures, to political modes and social relations, when they take on spiral forms? Is it possible—and at what cost, to what benefit—to allow nature’s secret Gothic anti-language to make itself manifest in the very fabric of our interactions and perceptions? Is this a hijack, or a jailbreak—even a prospective exit (e.g., from our current conditions and predicaments, ranging from the perennial vectors of decay and dysfunction that torture our societies, to the ecological crisis itself)?
Eventually, the town’s residents start deconstructing the town itself, reworking and rebuilding Kurouzu-cho on the basis of some new design—unsurprisingly, they are building a sprawling, labyrinthine spiral. At the centre of the town, formerly occupied by Dragonfly Pond, Shuichi and Kirie discover a vast, cyclopean spiral stairway, corkscrewing down into the depths of the earth. There, at the centre of all things, they discover what might be termed the lifeworld of abstraction.
And it is this discovery that enables the reader to understand what Uzumaki is really about, what Uzumaki does, both as an idea and a text. Remember that this word, uzumaki (うずまき), simply and literally means “spiral.” The book itself is a manifestation of the topological principle of existence it articulates—and, in this regard, it resembles texts like Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884), David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), or Greg Egan’s Permutation City (1994) more than anything else. As you read further, page by page, the spiral draws you into the blackened core of nature, viewed abstractly. In the diegesis, as the layers of phenomenological and social construction start to blur and distort, the underlying spiral processes (which constitute nature as such) are revealed, made manifest, but also the reader’s own perceptions become implicated in this. You start to see as nature does, or would, if nature were a great complex of unblinking eyes. Is this not the central organising principle of the most insidious horror stories, after all—namely, the discovery that you yourself are contaminated, infested, invested? Whodunit? It was you all along… Consider the old environmentalist chestnut: There is no away. You are not even what you think you are, but some spiral animal, creeping along fatal trajectories until you reach the vanishing point.
In sum, Uzumaki is about the organism’s discovery of abstraction, the unmediated encounter with the pervasive power of directionless, transformative abstraction that functions as the metachaotic engine of the world we find ourselves in. Indeed, abstraction is the only thing one could ever encounter without mediation (e.g., of semiotics or the senses). The spiral is here, at the level of growing cells and in syllogistic forms, in the cochlear folds and the labial involutions of topology itself, in the coiling and uncoiling of composition and decomposition, the very tentacular dynamics of creation and decay. Maybe the primordial spiral is still building itself, but inquiring minds want to know: What is it building down there, deep inside the ragged tunnels of the real?
Here is another articulation of Uzumaki’s ultimate concern, then: to depict the inhuman vitalism of reason itself, depicted as a kind of inextricable and monstrous principle entirely immanent to nature’s deep Gothic infrastructure.
Reason is impatient: As an infinitely unfolding process, it is necessarily interminable, because the process of self-revision by any means cannot stop, nor be stopped. You can try to opt out; you can make your last stand. But reason continues its unfolding, like an infinite origami nightmare
Reason is unkind: No respecter of the doxa—even those most precious to you and your sense of purpose or self—reason is the inhuman, relentless process of proposing, evaluating, and then discarding or integrating epistemic updates into directed graphs of contingent truths. Call this beautiful, vicious process simply: the spiral.
Reason insists on its own way: But the way of reason belongs to no one. It is something in which you participate, which subjects you to it, whenever you reason (which is probably all the time, even in your dreams…), but which is reducible to no one, to nothing. It is vitality itself, both the ghost and the darkness, spectating everywhere, from nowhere.
We all creep along the blackened spiral of life, but this spiral recursively penetrates and traverses every agent of reason, animating or structuring the very processes of thought as you pursue your deep assignment. It drills into you. Reasoning is something you do, after all—or, rather, it is something that does you, that does you up, cutting and slicing into the abstract meat of your mind, spiraling into the otherwise nullity of the skull and initiating a catastrophic reformatting, a cognitive revolution, with all the violence to the organism that implies. Consider an 18,000-year-old spiral-engraved mammoth ivory piece1 discovered in Siberia, and you will see there the afterlife of the sudden incursion of Homo sapiens’ cognisance of the spiral form into world history.
Call this the birth of mind, nature’s weirdest aspect and, perhaps, its most Gothic artifact…
Works Cited
Ito, J. (2013) Uzumaki. Translated by Oniki, Y. San Francisco: Viz Media.
Parker, E and Poland, M. (2019) Gothic Nature: An Introduction. Gothic Nature 1: 1–20.
https://gothicnaturejournal.com/
Author Biography
Michael Uhall is a political theorist at Indiana University East. He works on ecopessimism, geopolitics, philosophical anthropology, psychogeography, and the politics of outer space. His academic and nonfiction work appears in 3:AM Magazine, Contemporary Political Theory, Nature and Culture, Rhizomes, SYNTHETIC ZERØ, Utopia District, and Vault of Culture. His first book, Noir Materialism: Freedom and Obligation in Political Ecology, is now available from Rowman & Littlefield. His second book, Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside, is forthcoming from Routledge. Additional work in progress includes a philosophical and biographical study of the career and character of James Jesus Angleton and a Wittgensteinian reading of elements in One Thousand and One Nights.
- For more on the ‘meaning’ of symbols and ‘the spiral’, see Bradshaw Foundation’s Ancient Symbols in Rock Art: A Human Perspective, a Human Prerogative (2011). ↩︎