The Cutprice Guignol

For me, genre fiction has always felt like the most natural place to explore OCD.

Because living with obsessive-compulsive disorder has made much of my life feel disconnected from reality in the way a lot of genre fiction is – to have these irrational thoughts, recognise them as irrational, and then act on them anyway in the form of compulsions? At its worst, it made me feel like there was a block between the real world and me, like everything I did and thought and believed was filtered through this lens of irrationality that I was as ashamed of as I was controlled by.

And, when I first read Uzumaki in 2018, it instantly clicked with me as a representation of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Not in the literal sense, obviously, but in the visceral way that it feels to be caught at that point of obsession – even the title, meaning “Spiral”, captures that feeling of everything in your life circling down in smaller and smaller rings until the obsessions and the compulsions are the only things left.

But what I think ultimately made it so familiar to me was the idea of a pattern serving as a curse. The mysterious spiral curse that haunts the town and the population of Kurouzu-cho is an all-consuming presence serves as the source of the horror for the story. Characters claw out their own eardrums to reach spirals inside their heads, they force themselves into pottery to take on the shape of a spiral themselves – the smoke from their burned bodies even takes on the shape of a spiral, inescapable, even in death. While a pattern as a primary threat might not initially seem like a particularly dangerous one, Ito, via his incredible art, turns it into a violent, visceral creature that consumes people completely.

Their obsession with it eats them alive, leaving nothing left but this urge to repeat the pattern. Or, in some cases, the fear of it serves as a driving force – another distinctly relatable issue in OCD, as compulsions serve as a sort of irrational shield against imagined threats.

For anyone with OCD, there’s going to be some part of this story that sounds familiar. While it’s taken to that horror extreme that’s required for a manga like Uzumaki to work, it’s a surprisingly potent approach to depicting obsession and compulsion. And, seen through that lens, I really appreciate the ending of the story not seeking to give definitive answers as to where the spiral curse originated from. I understand why some people found the lack of clarity frustrating, but it makes sense to me as part of the reading of this story as a metaphor for compulsive behaviour; its impact is more important than its origins. The uneasy place the story ends – with the curse lurking in wait for another town to infect – feels like an extension of this, a stand-in for the way these behaviours and obsessions can abate before they return after a certain trigger.

It’s not the only piece of Ito’s work to explore themes of dangerous obsession – his iconic Enigma of the Amigara Fault is another brilliant example of this, and Splatter Film takes on a similar premise that leans more in to an addiction angle. But, for me, Uzumaki remains his most effective version of this notion, a genuinely brilliant horror story that serves as a potent metaphor for OCD and other compulsive disorders.

I would love to hear about your take on Uzumaki – it’s such a rich piece of work, I know a lot of you will have other interpretations of it, and I’d love to read them in the comments!

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(header image via Bleeding Cool)