Comics, Weirdness

Savoring Junji Ito’s Uzumaki ( a.k.a A Brief Interlude)

While at LA, I found out that my old, old friend and ex-flatmate Vineet was in Pasadena. Vineet found out, to his peril, that the most acceptable way of arranging a meetup with my cantankerous eBay-scouring self was to offer himself as a mule to transport a bunch of manga that I won the same day. ( I know, isn’t that a coincidence? ) So he landed up at Beverly Glen, hauling thirty four manga volumes on his backpack, after having to change three buses to get to the apartment.

To make up for his trouble, I introduced him to Junji Ito’s Uzumaki (‘Spiral’). The cover boasts ‘Terror in the Tradition of The Ring’, and I say to that – “Pish-tosh!” Because while Ring was a nice slow burn of a read as a book, and was terrifying as a film adaptation in Japanese, the manga version was not even something you could call horror – I would probably slot it into RL Stine-level, kid-friendly fare. Uzumaki – sigh – I tried reading volume 1 in my hotel room at around midnight, and about fifteen minutes later, I had to keep it aside and go reread the first few issues of Tomorrow Stories. That’s because the demented Mr. Ito and his finely inked panels wrought holy havoc on my dinner, and a little more of Uzumaki would have either (a) caused me to run to the bathroom and throw up every bit of undigested food in my tummy or (b) led me to toss and turn in bed with nightmarish visions floating in through the hotel balcony.

It is an undeniable page-turner, but there are times when you just know you gotta give up.

As embellishment to Mr Ito’s skills, here are three pictures of Vineet reading Uzumaki (in the daytime, of course) – observe the three stages, and note that the last picture was taken in a car, when we were off to drop him to the bus-stop and there was still a part of volume 3   remaining even as we made our way.

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