Kurôzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. According to Shuichi Saito, the withdrawn boyfriend of teenager Kirie Goshima, their town is haunted not by a person or being but by a pattern: uzumaki, the spiral, the hypnotic secret shape of the world. It manifests itself in small ways: seashells, ferns, whirlpools in water, whirlwinds in air. And in large ways: the spiral marks on people's bodies, the insane obsessions of Shuichi's father, the voice from the cochlea in your inner ear. As the madness spreads, the inhabitants of Kurôzu-cho are pulled ever deeper, as if into a whirlpool from which there is no return......

Kurôzu-cho, a small fogbound town on the coast of Japan, is cursed. But the spirit which haunts it does not have a name or a body, only a shape: uzumaki the spiral, the hypnotic secret shape of the world. It possessed the father of teenage Kirie's withdrawn boyfriend Shuichi, causing him to remake himself in its image before he died. It grows in ferns, in seashells, in curls of hair, and in the crooked folds of the human brain. Giant snails are sighted near the high school. An eerie glow shines from the abandoned lighthouse. Mosquitoes fly in drowsy curves and feed on blood. As more people are caught in the pattern, over the town of Kurôzu-cho hangs the spiral smoke of cremated corpses; because even in death, there is no escape......

Something is rotten in Okinawa...the floating stench of death hangs over the island. What is it? A strange, legged fish appears on the scene...so begins Tadashi and Kaori's spiral into the horror (and stench) of the sea. Here is the long-awaited new horror manga series from the Eisner-nominated creator of Uzumaki, Junji Ito....

With their town devastated by titanic hurricanes, the citizens of the spiral-haunted town of Kurôzu-cho--including Shuichi, Kirie and her family--find themselves cut off from the outside world. Reporters and rescue teams cross the mountain range into Kurôzu-cho only to find themselves unable to leave. Trapped inside the cursed ruins, the desperate survivors struggle and huddle together, waiting to run into giant snails or worse. The very laws of nature are changed as the spiral sucks them in. And to fight it, or to escape, the last survivors must go to the heart of the horror to witness what may be their evenutal fate......

Trapped on an island filled with the stench of mutating bodies, can teenager Tadashi save his girlfriend from a fate worse than death? Or will the cure prove worse than the disease? Hold your breath until all is revealed--along with the final stinking secrets of the "walking fish of Okinawa"!...