“Uzumaki is the story of Kirie Goshima, a young girl living in a coastal town that is slowly falling into the grip of a ‘spiral curse.’ The townsfolk, to varying degrees, become obsessed and subsequently infected by spirals.
“Ito-san’s spirals operate with similar symbolic significance to the circles of hell, namely, they are partly allegorical, as well as literal, of the spirals and endless cycles of human behavior…as in Dante’s hell all things become literal, he is physically twisted to reflect his psychological reality. Each person in Uzumaki is trapped in their own sin.
“Junji Ito understands, as Dante did, that even positive emotions like love have a place in hell when they are taken to extremes. Like a spiral itself, the story circles whilst drawing ever closer to a central point…like Dante, Junji Ito doesn’t flinch from showing us the full expanse and architecture of the hell he has created, and we see the very “nadir” or low-point of the spiral, and what that represents.” [. . .] –Joseph Sale, The English Cantos, April 8, 2020 (retrieved October 27, 2021)
