Then, in the final chapters, Uzumaki shifts gears once again, kicking it up to full-throttle cosmic horror that rivals anything ever written by Lovecraft. With no connection to the outside world and supplies running low, the survivors take desperate measures, forming gangs (including a horde of sinister children who surf the whirlwinds and kill anyone who ventures out of the row houses) and eating whatever they can find, even cannibalizing anyone unlucky enough to transform into a snail person.
The only structures not impacted by the daily onslaught of spiraling whirlwinds are the decaying row houses on the edge of town. A succession of rescue crews also find themselves stuck in Kurouzo-cho, knowing they are only minutes from the edge of town, but unable to get back. To make the situation worse for the few survivors of the hurricane, the town no longer allows anyone to leave. But about halfway through, when a hurricane decimates the town, the story shifts gears from Cronenberg territory into a suspenseful, nightmarish tale of survival. In episodic chapters, the first half of Uzumaki charts the increasingly nightmarish bodily horrors that afflict the residents of Kurouzu-cho. Hideous and beautiful transformations, death of family, death of community, death of self: this is the world of Uzumaki. The teenage lovers of warring families transform into serpents and vanish into the sea, never to be seen again. A potter becomes obsessed with the grotesque ceramics that emerge from his kiln after the spirals infect the lake where he gathers clay. When she notices that human fingerprints are spiral-patterned, one woman cuts off her fingertips with a pair of scissors. Slow-moving students transform into snail people others stretch their bodies into spirals just to die.
The obsession with spirals seizes the town’s residents like a fever, causing intense paranoia, fear, madness and eventually complete transformation. They manifest in ramen, on pottery wheels, in the fields and sky.
The coastal town of Kurouzu-cho is infested with spirals.
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