Well, those were two books. Thanks for the nightmares, Ito.
In all seriousness, these were, for the most part, really well done pieces of horror. Ito certainly knows how to build a sense of discomfort, unease, and dread in his reader, and this is evident in both Gyo and Uzumaki, as the reader waits to see what will be the next step of escalation in a situation which, from the start, is already absurd, screwed up, and visually disturbing. Rotting fish with spider-like legs? A man making himself into a spiral in a pot, breaking his bones in the processes? Both messed up. But what if those spider-like legs moved from host to host until there were rotting but still barely alive humans, deformed and trapped on them? What an entire town's worth of people deformed into spirals and tangled up into a mass which is slowly turning to stone as a part of an eldritch spiral curse? Fucked up.
One of the most effective techniques Ito employs, which is pretty unique to manga, is the use of the page turn to reveal something horrifying and disturbing. This can, to a lesser extent, be achieved with a normal novel, but after the page turn there is still the time of reading, so it is not an immediate reveal. With the visual medium of a comic, the moment you turn the page, you see and register whatever messed up thing Ito wants to show you. He uses this frequently in both manga, and from the little of his other works I have read, namely The Enigma of Amigara Fault, this is a staple of his work. It allows for the distorted, disturbing imagery to have an even greater impact than those times when it is shown mid-page, as the page turn allows it to function as a sudden slap to the face. At times, especially with Gyo, which I read a physical copy of, I found myself dreading to turn the page frequently, regardless if there was set up for a reveal or not.
The horror of the two manga, despite both being predominantly expressed through body horror, interestingly enough have two very different sources. Gyo is not subtle in it's parallels to the affects of nuclear warfare, something which only Japan has experienced first hand and thus has a unique perspective on. The origin of the gas legs comes from experiments during wartime, which were in significant part biological warfare, experiments of which there is little trace outside of the few scientists who would admit to the horrors they created. Not unlike the creation of the nuclear bomb during WW2. Even more damning in this respect are the mutations that the gas legs cause in all living beings, leaving them deformed, with serious impacts on their bodies, much like the lasting impact that the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had in causing various mutations and deformities on life in those areas, long past the initial impact of the explosion. Another aspect of the horror which is rooted in the Japanese perspective is where the legs came from: the sea. As an island nation, the threat of something dangerous coming from the sea is much more real than, say, most of America would experience. Interestingly enough, years after Gyo was published, Japan did experience a tragedy which was tied to both the sea and nuclear radiation, when a tsunami and earthquake caused damage to a nuclear power plant in 2011. In many ways, these are real fears of the Japanese people that Ito plays upon in his work.
Comparatively, from what I understand, the root of the horror in Uzumaki is much less uniquely Japanese. Spirals are found everywhere, in the natural world and the human one. Tornados, springs, fingerprints, wood knots, hell, the carpet of my dorm has a repeating spiral pattern. They're everywhere, though most of the time we do not notice. Ito uses something so normal, and shows time and time again just how many different ways something so mundane could be twisted into something horrifying. While there is nothing uniquely Japanese to this horror, there is something unique to the spiral shape which Ito employs time and time again, and even points out: how the shape draws you in, spiraling closer and closer to the center, not letting you out. Some of the horror is in what he turns into spirals, such as all of the body horror of people physically twisting their forms into the shape, but other parts are more the psychological aspect, the obsession shown in two different forms in Shuichi's parents, obsessive love and obsessive fear. Personally, I found that the first volume was the most disturbing of the three, as by the second and third I felt more desensitized to the body horror, even as it escalated. The chapter that I found most effective was Chapter 2, about Shuichi's mother, as it was a good balance of the extreme and the grounded, as well as the psychological aspects of horror. I found chapters such as 6: Medusa and 7: Jack in the Box a lot less impactful due to them being just plain absurd, without any real grounding in reality, while Chapter 2 had the advantage of playing upon phobias pushed to an extreme as well as trauma, both of which are more easily applicable to real life. I also found Uzumaki as a whole when it came across more a chapters being short vignettes, rather than trying to tie everything together, which left the entire last volume feeling unsatisfying. It also brought up the question of why people didn't try to escape before that volume, as there is no suggestion that the population would have been unable to escape when, say, people started turning into snails.
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