Uzumaki, Vol. 2

Uzumaki is a long-form horror manga by Junji Ito, serialized irregularly in Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits from 1998 to 1999 and collected in three volumes. The story takes place in Kurozu-cho, a town between mountains and sea: high school girl Kirie Goshima and her boyfriend Shuichi Saito, who studies in a neighboring town, discover that the townspeople have begun to develop a morbid fascination with spiral shapes; some twist their bodies into spirals and die, some grow hair in spiraling profusion, and the curse spreads like an epidemic over the whole town. This is Volume 2 of the series, collecting chapters 7 through 12, including "The Spiral Obsession," "The Snail," "The Black Lighthouse," "Mosquito Pillar," "The Umbilical Cord," and "Typhoon No. 1": Kirie's classmate Yamaguchi dies and becomes a jack-in-the-box doll with a spring inside; students and teachers shrink into shells one after another and become snail people; a spiral light in an abandoned lighthouse makes walking straight impossible; and in Kurozu Hospital, women about to give birth behave strangely. The anomalies escalate, and Kirie and Shuichi support each other amid growing chaos, trying to hold on to the last of their sanity while never finding the source of the curse.