(Read at own choice, but the main subject of this blog is in the conclusion and it is okay to jump to the end.)
“At the suggestion of my close friends I am going to post new blogs on Mondays or at least strive to do so. This monday I am going to introduce a manga I read during break, Junji Ito’s Uzamaki. Seeing as I said in my first post that I want to go beyond surface level summary, I am going to try and convince you that this is a unique manga based on its structure, art style, and just how conceptually insane it really is, because this is what drew me into the manga.
I just realized that I cannot really begin to explain all this because I know that some of you probably do not know what manga is. Well for those that don’t know, a manga is just a Japanese version of a graphic novel or comic book. Now that you know the medium of work I will begin to explore, I must first give a little background information to the manga. Uzamaki is an apparently popular horror manga, which I originally heard about in a YouTube video about which forms of media suit horror the most as a genre. The copy of Uzamaki I read was a deluxe edition that was composed of a collection of stories all told about a solitary town hidden in the mountains of Japan. The town is slowly being taken over by “spirals”. By this I mean that the townsfolk become obsessed with objects containing spirals and they cause people to do various strange things with their trades, to themselves, others around them. All of these stories revolve around one high school girl, Kirie. So basically this is a collection of a bunch of scary stories told about a cursed town, and this one girl has to struggle through it all.
Now normally I find most manga like this not interesting. Or at least not interesting in the same way. For instance, in the past I have read such “horror” manga as Berserk and watched anime’s like Hell Girl. However these tend to be more associated to gore, and less horror. Essentially once you get past the gore or tormented body, the substance is lacking ( in Hell Girls case) or I just find the plot interesting ( like in Berserk). However, when reading Uzamaki and trying a tad more than usual to focus on certain elements, I had a much different experience than my previous exposure to Japanese horror in the form of manga and anime.
To illustrate these Ideas I will focus on my favorite of the many stories throughout the book, Mosquito’s and Umbilical cords. The basic plot of these two stories are mosquitoes infected by the “spirals” curse infect pregnant women across the town with their illness. This proceeds to be the most metal thing I have ever read in my life. Prepare yourself for some metal drawings, some fucked up concepts, and the strange level of enjoyment that reading this brought me during this spring break.
We start the story with our protagonist Kirie in the hospital. Attempting to swat the mosquito, it quickly dodges and somehow knows to fly in a spiral to make her faint so it can prey on her body. What like about this section is the amount of frames on the page. Now normally I wouldn’t recognize something like this, but I kept wondering how in the hell I read this manga so fast. The only thing I could think of for this was the progression of the stories in their form. If we look at the size of each panel on this page there are large ones a small ones. The large ones are introducing us to the environment, while the small ones show us the main action of this mesmerizing mosquito. Now the small panels in the center that are flashing between the eye and mosquito are a pattern throughout this story that shows the quickness of the action. Within just a few frames the mosquito has worked its magic and puts Kirie to sleep. The fact that these tiles are small and have less details, forced me to glide over them with great speed, and zip through the story. Now I consider myself a pretty slow reader, so I’m convinced that the pacing of these stories is quickened through the form.
Okay now to stop boring you with technical reasons why I enjoyed this manga and on to the fun stuff, the art and concept. So as i said before mosquitoes infect pregnant women and they become a sort of mosquito being themselves. but what does this look like??
It looks like some twisted evil dead crazy shit that no one makes anymore. These woman need blood to feed their babies so they eat patients in the hospital at night. Whats terrifying is that they move in packs, and use hand drills. They could use a syringe without the stopper, but no, they use drills. Now ignoring the gore, what made these two stories stand out was the feelings of isolation and again how metal the ideas are. As the above pages show, the main character is alone during this night of murder and has to defend herself. These pregnant women kill all others that see them and it is just by mere luck Kirie doesn’t succumb the same fate. This is what really adds to make this story feel scary, is this sense of her versus a hoard of mosquito moms and how slim the chance of her survival seems at times.
However, I really dont want to spend time talking about that nearly as much as I want to show you how damn metal this manga is. Because really while I do appreciate the form of this manga encouraging the reader to almost speed read, and the deeper levels of horror it is dealing with through its isolation,what I really like the most is just how fucked up and twisted the content is. It is weird to say that, but it’s true. I kept thinking to myself while reading, “Holy shit this is insane. Whoever wrote this is demented and awesome.” The ideas and imagery presented were just so insane, that I had to share it. I literally would stop reading to go show my roommates and people around me just how bizarre it was. I’ll just give a few pages to show just how mental some of the images were, and then ill rate this manga. Warning-nudity is coming, but reality check it’s 2017 you shouldn’t care.
This baby is terrifying. In this story the babies born from the mosquito women just want to go back in their mothers wombs. To do so they have developed skills of understanding adults, and grow back their umbilical cords and use them to hypnotize adults into doing their wishes.
Again, this baby is terrifying. Look at the blank eyes, like what the hell. Also this is the umbilical cord that is used to communicate with adults…
As I said this would get more and more twisted, well this kind doctor above just wants to help these babies. Although he didn’t always have this disposition. Before he was hypnotized by the babies to help their cause, he tried to cut off the babies regenerating placentas. Well they then started to grow on the ground of the hospital and he did the only thing that he could in his situation, start feeding them to the patients. When i first read this I was just blown away by how disgusting this was, and then I turned the page and saw THIS!
I honestly can’t decide what is more terrifying, this drawing of a mangled body that has had a baby implanted back inside it’s mother, or this poor woman’s face. The eyes in manga and comics in general is a key tool for showing emotions. The lack of pupils convey to me a feeling of emptiness and just total lack of humanity. I feel like the image of her stomach bleeding being next to her drained face is suppose to make us as readers try and decide what is really worse- the physical pain or the mental pain. I’d have to say….”
CONCLUSION
SO these past weeks have been incredibly busy with school and work and all that jazz… However, I have put a lot of work into this post and realized I hated every second of it. Every time I revised this post I kept looking at it and changing it and was never happy. I couldn’t even finish it because it was so fucking boring. Which made me think…why did I even write this? In my first article I said I wanted to improve my writing skills, so I applied what I do in my classes to something I enjoyed. Yet, it ruined it. Writing analysis sucks. I mean it really does. I don’t think many people even like reading it. It is not practical in any regard and is fucking boring to write. I slowly felt the enjoyment of reading this manga sucked out of me as if some English major vampire was feeding on my soul. It was brutal and I had to stop. I liked writing this piece though for a few reasons I did not originally set out for. For starters I have fully established within myself that I hate analytical essay style writing. This shit is fucking boring and will be the death of me if I ever have a job that forces me to write like this…well lets not think about it. I also learned that I can learn from writing things I hate. After thinking about what to write for a couple days spent writing and deleting everything and then rewriting it all…it kind of popped in my head that this is not the writing I want to do. Which I am glad to have learned from this exercise. I highly recommend the manga, but I will leave the unedited and incomplete argument above to show you why…
I’ll try to spend some time this weekend researching some things to write about. Maybe I’ll practice writing a short story or something or I have an idea of a collage… we shall see. Hopefully I’ll be able to write more regularly in the near future. Until then..
Outspoken Otaku 