David Peach

Jack in the Box — Synopsis

Kirie Goshima has an admirer, and an annoying one at that. His name is Mitsuru Yamaguchi and he has a very frustrating habit. He keeps on jumping out and surprising Kirie at moments when she least expects it. One such time is during the walk home from school with her friend Shiho. Shiho warns him off, but he continues to annoy Kirie nonetheless. For him, this is how he shows his love for her.

After a little time, he decides to send Kirie a present in the mail. However, instead of opening it she decides to meet up with him to return the gift. He seems sincere in his affection at this point and decides to prove his love once and for all. Declaring that his love is strong enough to stop traffic, he jumps out into the path of a moving car. A final jump that sees his body wrapped around the front wheel of the unsuspecting driver.

After Mitsuru’s funeral, Kirie is wracked with guilt over his untimely death. But it may not be the last she has heard from him – this is Kurouzu-cho after all. The spiral is ever-present and can make all sorts of things possible.

One evening while talking through the grief with her boyfriend Shuichi, she gets a terrifying vision from the gift that Mitsuru had left her. She discovers that the present is a very apt one for it’s sender — it is a Jack in the Box. The Jack in the Box seems to tell her that his death was indeed her fault. And not only that, but that Mitsuru will come back for her too.

Deciding to find out the truth behind the Jack’s whispers, and to try and rid her head of its voices, Kirie and Shuichi take a shovel to Mitsuru’s grave to ensure he is in fact dead. But they are not prepared for what they find in the ground.

The subtleness of the Spiral

When seen from above, a coiled spring will display the shape of the spiral. Not only that but the spring can also represent the releasing of stored energy. This idea could well be what gave birth to the character of Mitsuru. But it isn’t until the closing pages when this becomes apparent. Once you’ve read it once, the spiral can be seen throughout this chapter. He is the metaphorical coiled spring jumping out at Kirie again and again. But until you’ve read it, the spiral is indeed subtle.

Inanimate objects with human likeliness always have the potential for horror. Just think ceramic dolls and old toys in the attic. But what I loved in this chapter was that not only did Junji Ito manage to depict an otherwise innocent Jack in the Box as demonic and foreboding. He also managed to have it perfectly represent the key character, Mitsuro.

The spiral has had a very visual presence in the town so far. It has appeared in cremation smoke, pottery and even throughout victims’ hair. But this is perhaps the most subtle that the spiral has been up till now. In fact, I would be so bold as to say that this chapter could almost be read outside of Uzumaki altogether.

The way in which Ito ties the character of Mitsuru to that of a Jack in the Box was a stroke of genius. Especially when he later makes use of the spring from the car that killed him to make his complete transformation. Yes, the spiral is present in the springs throughout, but take the spiral obsession out of the equation and you still have a strong horror nightmare with an almost self-fulfilling prophecy.

Coiled up terror

As I began writing up my thoughts on ‘Jack in the Box’, I began to notice how the chapter’s structure itself felt just like a coiled spring. With each unwanted jump scare from Mitsuru winding up the metaphorical coil until he is stopped dead in his tracks by that car. That impact and his winding quickly around the front wheel of that car are the first glimpses of horror we see, and the first release of the coiled spring of the chapter.

Once the funeral is done with, Kirie’s descent into guilt and the foreboding presence of the Jack in the box toy, wind up the chapter’s final spring. It is wound up tightly and held with each step that her and Shuichi take through that graveyard. Until those final pages and the explosion of energy that shoots out towards them. The second spring is released and the two of them are directly in its path.

I may be reading too much into these stories, and perhaps seeing things that I want to see, but that is precisely why I’m writing these thoughts up. I just love seeing what my mind can find beneath the surface of Ito’s work — and as I have quickly come to realise, there is always more to find beneath his expertly-drawn panels than meets the eye.

In Conclusion

Jack in the box is definitely a chapter that can be enjoyed on its own and without any prior context to the preceding Uzumaki chapters. Yes, there are mentions of the spiral cremation smoke trails from The Spiral Obsession opening chapters, but they are only mentioned in passing. And they are not needed to be fully understood for this chapter to be enjoyed.

Jack in the Box is one of my favourite chapters from the Uzumaki collection. Something about the character of Mitsuru and the enjoyable absurdity of his constant jumping out at Kirie have stuck with me. I think that, along with the following chapter The Slug, are images that have stayed with me the strongest since my first time reading Uzumaki some years ago.

One of the great things about this chapter for me, was how it is almost ambiguous in its final half. With both Kirie and Shuichi having already come face to face with the spiral, who’s to know if what they experience in that graveyard is real? (it probably is).

Was it just a nightmare? Who knows? (probably not). But one thing is for certain – Junji Ito sure knows how to tell one hell of a great story.

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Medusa — synopsis

Up until now, the Spiral has been affecting the people around Kirie Goshima. Her boyfriend Shuichi’s parents; her own father; a friend at school. But in Medusa, the Spiral is finally catching up to her and has it’s sights set directly on a particular part of her body — her hair.

After a school boy’s death and some discussions with a friend over people’s sudden desires to be noticed, Kirie’s hair begins displaying the cursed Spiral in its curls. This seems to have happened out of nowhere, after a sudden growth of her hair. Will she now finally fall victim like so many before her?

When the curls in her hair are threatened, they begin to take on a life of their own — the spiral protecting itself. The hair grows faster than is naturally possibly and even physically fights back against those that would do it harm. But when a school friend of Kirie’s see’s these ever-growing curls as a threat to her own dominance, that friend decides to challenge her in one of the craziest showdowns I’ve ever seen in a manga.

A hairdresser’s nightmare

The subject of hair in Junji Ito’s body horror is something that you may have seen before. In his Tomie chapter “Hair“, characters attach strands of Tomie’s hair to their heads in order for them to obtain her beauty. But in Uzumaki’s Medusa, the Spiral is drawing these people’s own hair out of their heads in order to seduce and mesmerise those around them.

The idea of parts of one’s own body being out of ones control is a scary one. These have been explored in horror before, whether it’s the classic “arm transplant but the arm is that of a murderer’s” or “an eye transplant that lets you see ghosts”. But the idea of using hair against the person who owns it is a fresh one to me.

I loved how the hair became so flamboyant and ridiculous as to lure in those around it. But what I found even more effective was how the hair, whilst growing at such a fast rate, took its toll on the owner. You could see it in Kirie’s eyes as the hair lusted after a bigger audience. But it wasn’t until the closing pages that you see its true effect on a host.

The spiral effect grows

We’ve seen pretty isolated cases of the spiral at work until now. Limited to families and those closely related. Even the episode with Shuichi’s mother in the hospital could be written up as a woman’s madness on the doctor’s report. But the actual encounters with inexplicable spirals has been limited save for those involved.

In Medusa, however, the hair that grows from Kirie, and later her friend Sekino, is so unnatural that it just can’t be explained away. No amount of hair spray could have kept those curls up. It would have been plain to all that this is some unnatural force at work. Could it be that the Spiral curse is ready to show itself more widely now? Is it no longer content with appearing in the corners of Kurouzu-cho and instead now wants a larger audience for itself?

Interestingly, the Spiral only seemed to target Kirie after she had been clear to her friend about not wanting to stick out. She was content with just moving along in life. The idea that her friends’ obsessions with being noticed was intrinsically linked to the spiral’s presence, seemed to be confirmed when she was made the centrepiece of the Spiral’s plans within the Kurouzu-cho school.

In Conclusion

The image of the woman with the large curls floating over her head is a common one from Uzumaki. When seeing images from the manga or even clips from the Uzumaki film, it is a pretty staple image. Indeed it does represent both how incredibly inventive and at times ludicrous the world within Kurouzu-cho becomes.

Medusa is a calmer story than most from Uzumaki with absolutely zero gore. The goriest image is that of a girl whose life is visibly drained from her face; her skin and eyes sunk back. But nothing more than how you would expect a mummy to look in a museum. In fact, the story is home to more humour than gore. Granted it is a particular kind of humour, but it is there nonetheless.

This story seems to be opening up the Spiral to a wider array of people within the town. Many more are becoming affected by it, and it’s only a matter of time until the Spiral’s full force is released. I think Kirie will still serve as the central character, but the curse looks to be spreading its wings wider and wider from here on out.