Asian Horror: Uzumaki (Vol.1+2, 6 Points)

     The main theme I found in Uzumaki was obsession. This is shown at the beginning with Shuichi’s father and how his obsession with spirals was the cause of his death and thus fated Kurôzu-cho with the same demise. Most of the horrors that took place were precedented with someone becoming obsessed with something or someone.

The Curse of the Spiral, as Shuichi would describe it, seemed to already take form in everyone whether they knew it or not. The two girls at school who were friends with Kirie, the first one who was obsessed with attempting to make Shuichi fall for her as every other boy did and vanished from her scar that became a spiral and swallowed her whole, and the second one who was so jealous of Kirie’s new power of her hair being able to captivate people that her hair began to do the same but eventually drained her life source because she was obsessed with wanting more attention. Mitsuru, the boy who was so obsessed with Kiri and was determined to steal her heart despite having a boyfriend, took it to the grave in which he becomes reanimated, in tribute to his nickname as a jack-in-the-box, and still chased Kirie.  The young couple that was constantly forced to be separated by their enemy families wanted to be together so bad that they coiled and conjoined like the two snakes and became inseparable. Prior to that though, I noticed that the boy was talking to Kirie he continuously used words such as “twisted,” “warped,” “bent out of shape,” which made me truly realize that the cursed really is already embedded in the town. 

The spiral is a metaphor for obsession and the “curse” is a display of how obsessiveness leads to corruption of the mind. As someone who was raised Buddhists, the underlying themes you’re supposed to take away from the religion is to be selfless and live humbly and not seek out materialistic values. The connection of this idealogy and how obsession is portrayed as something that will only bring bad things is something that I find very interesting and that I never truly connected until reading Uzumaki.

The theme of obsession goes outside of Uzumaki is seems to be a staple in Japanese culture. A huge character archetype called the Yandere, who is someone (typically a female) who is so in love with someone that they would go through extreme lengths just to be with them, such as murdering anyone seen as competition. This is shown in the film Perfect Blue, directed by Satoshi Kon, in which our main character Mima Kirigoe, a pop idol who decides to change her career to pursue acting and haunted by a fan who stalks her to the point in which she doesn’t understand what is real and what is fake and loses all sense of herself in the sense where she creates this vision of herself as a pop idol and how that version of her haunts her.