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All spoilers on this page are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
Main Characters
Kirie Goshima
Click here for her post-Chapter 6 appearance
Click here to see her cursed by the Spiral
Click here for her and Shuichi's ultimate fate
Voiced by: Uki Satake (JP)
Played by: Eriko Hatsune (movie), Chika Anzai (animated dub)
An average upper middle-class eighteen-year-old who would rather focus on other things, things that are not spiral-shaped and murderous. However, with the Spiral hellbent on destroying her hometown, this doesn't go well.Played by: Eriko Hatsune (movie), Chika Anzai (animated dub)
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Played with. Albeit she is thrown around quite a bit, and even loses her locks at some point of the story, Kirie is shown to be one of Ito's most beautiful women protagonists throughout, albeit one whose beauty only plays a marginal part in the story.
- Boyish Short Hair: She sports this look after Shuichi cuts her hair off to free it from the Spiral's curse.
- Brutal Honesty: Shown best in chapter 4. Kirie isn't afraid to tell people exactly how stupid, childish, weird, or just downright insane they're being.
- The Caretaker: To Shuichi, as of chapter 3.
- Character Development: She becomes significantly more understanding of other people and their plights over the course of the manga, and also grows to accept the reality of the situation her town is in.
- Defiant to the End: She and Shuichi manage to spur the Spiral one final time as they freeze, twisting together with their eyes turned toward each other, depriving the Spiral of its wish to be seen.
- Fatal Flaw: Her willful ignorance. She pays for it dearly by losing her chance to escape
- Final Girl: In the movie, though it's implied that she might not last that long.
- Frozen in Time: Her ultimate fate along with Shuichi, as they twist themselves together just as the Spiral ritual completes and time freezes in the catacombs, at least until the next cycle.
- Girlish Pigtails: In the movie.
- Indifferent Beauty: One of Junji Ito's most beautiful protagonists, albeit one that neither pays attention to said aspect of herself, nor the story makes it particularly relevant.
- Living Emotional Crutch: To Shuichi, who loses both of his parents and from then on, doesn't engage with other people. It gets worse; Shuichi eventually breaks down anyway, and Kirie is clearly very upset about this.
- Misery Builds Character: Her better understanding of others is mainly because she has to watch all her closest friends die and witness some pretty gruesome stuff.
- Naïve Everygirl: In the movie, taken up a notch.
- Nice Girl: One of her defining traits is her kind, helpful nature, regardless of what is going on around her.
- Ordinary High-School Student: Though she had to have graduated between chapters 8 and 9, she was this until the Spiral started killing people close to her.
- The Quiet One: Implied to be this at school, however not quite as much in other contexts. She is uninterested in popularity or beauty, and doesn't like being thrust into the spotlight by the spiral.
- Reduced To Rat Burgers: Snail people burgers to be precise. She holds off on eating it for as long as she can, but once she sees Shuichi partaking in the meat of a snail person, she relents.
- Selective Obliviousness: To the Spiral. This ends when she's personally targeted by it for the first time.
- Significant Haircut: She loses her long hair the first time the Spiral first targets her.
- Socially Awkward Hero: You can chuck all the gruesomely deformed corpses and madmen you want to at Kirie and the worst you'll get out of her is maybe a short scream. But have her become the center of her schoolmates' attention, and she'll completely break down.
- Sugar-and-Ice Personality: Played pretty straight. She isn't receptive to the idea of the spiral curse and ignores or silences Shuichi's ravings about it, yet she's also very kind and considerate.
- Too Dumb to Live: Kirie doesn't try to leave the town until it's been made impossible. She doesn't actually die, though; she just gets frozen in time, while conscious, presumably for centuries or millennia.
- Unfazed Everyman: Is calm and serious despite usually being surrounded by pure undiluted spirals.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Seems to know all the best ways to survive a teen drama, but unfortunately knows absolutely nothing about being in a psychological survival horror targeted at adults.
Shuichi Saito
- Adaptational Jerkass: He's far more of an intentional jackass in the movie.
- Blessed with Suck: It's not very fun to be able to correctly sense something fundamentally wrong about everything, but be unable to convince anyone of the truth.
- Brutal Honesty: Will tell any given character about their fate at the hands of the Spiral, whether they want to hear it or not. Given the seemingly outlandish nature of his predictions, they probably don't.
- The Cassandra: No one ever believes his predictions.
- Deadpan Snarker: Definitely has his moments.Kirie: Will the storm continue to kill people until it finds me?
Shuichi: Why don't you go out and ask it yourself? - Defiant to the End: He and Kirie manage to spur the Spiral one final time as they freeze, twisting together with their eyes turned toward each other, depriving the Spiral of its wish to be seen.
- Despair Event Horizon: He mostly crosses it around chapter 14 when he accepts that the town is now inescapable, but he at least continues fighting to protect Kirie. At the end of chapter 19, after breaking his legs from the fall into the Spiral City, he completely gives up on continuing and decides to instead embrace Kirie in their final moments before time freezes.
- Dissonant Serenity: Once it becomes clear that the town and Spiral's curse are impossible to escape, he transitions from being angry and loud regarding everything to quietly repeating how mad everyone is going and bluntly explaining to others what their likely fates are.
- Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: HOO BOY.
- Extreme Doormat: Never defends himself or tries to save himself. Never.
- Forgets to Eat: He's so busy having horrific visions of the future forced into his head by the Spiral and worrying about Kirie that Kirie has to step in and bring him food.
- Frozen in Time: His ultimate fate along with Kirie, as they twist themselves together just as the Spiral ritual completes and time freezes in the catacombs, at least until the next cycle.
- Innocently Insensitive: Constantly calls people "contaminated," "cursed," or "infected" (by the Spiral). The problem is that he also does it to their faces.
- Love Martyr: If Kirie listened to and believed him sooner, the two would have left the town and been spared the curse. All the same, he is willing to stay with her despite it meaning they'll both be doomed.
- Nervous Wreck: Will freak out completely at the sight of spirals.
- Only Sane Man: Though he does suffer Sanity Slippage in the later chapters from trauma and stress, he's the only one who is consistently correct about the Spiral's curse and continually advocates for leaving the town. Even after leaving becomes impossible, he still does maintains a rather stoic demeanor in the face of all the horror.
- Perpetual Frowner: He never smiles once during the series. Justified, considering all of the traumatic events he experiences.
- The Quiet One: After the traumas he goes through, he speaks very little, and mostly only to Kirie.
- Sanity Slippage: He may be immune to being driven mad directly by the Spiral, but this doesn't keep him from slowly going insane from the sheer emotional/psychological torture of knowing about it.
- Stopped Caring: About anything aside from Kirie, whom he devotes his entire existence to. Actually played seriously in this example.
- Too Hungry to Be Polite: In chapter 4, at the Goshimas' house and quite possibly the only trope Played for Laughs with Shuichi. Even then, it's later Played for Drama when he's forced to eat the meat of a snail person out of desperation in chapter 16.
- Trauma Button: Spirals. Spirally, spirally spirals. Especially ones that give him visions of his father's twisted corpse.
- Troubled Fetal Position: Often shown like this during scenes set in his house.
- Waif Prophet: Starved, sleep-deprived, severely traumatized, and able to predict the future.
- Wardrobe Flaw of Characterization: Dresses exclusively in obviously expensive formal wear, however he's so skinny that his clothes practically dangle off his body, which effectively ruins the whole look.
- You Are Worth Hell: Played straight with his refusal to leave the town without Kirie, even though it's implied that he knows what's going to happen to them both if they stay.
Family Members
Mitsuo Goshima
Click here for his ultimate fate
Kirie's younger brother.
- Amplified Animal Aptitude: When cornered on a cliffside while fleeing from the mad relief workers who want to eat him for being a snail, Kirie urges him to climb down the cliff and wait for her. He seems to understand.
- Children Are Innocent: He wants to join the gang of survivors, believing that they're able to survive because they're cool. When he and the main characters try to sneak past them while looking for food, Mitsuo gets mad at Kirie for somehow not understanding that the cool dudes are clearly cooking something good and might be willing to share if they just talk to them, so he ends up revealing themselves to the gang members.
- Forced Transformation: He becomes a snail.
- Improbable Infant Survival: Nearly averted a couple of times. At one point, he's endangered by the lighthouse, and he is also at risk as he starts to turn into a snail. In addition, the relief workers are willing to kill him for food, and his fate after separating from Kirie is unknown. Given that everyone in Kurôuzu-cho is screwed no matter what, this probably goes the same for him.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: His fate after separating from Kirie, Shuichi, and Chie on the cliff is unknown. We can assume he was either eaten, possibly died of old age due to the unknown amount of years the trio spent trying to escape, somehow died to the Spiral, and/or is still alive and waiting for Kirie to come back.
Mr. Goshima
Click here for his ultimate fate
Kirie's father.
- Mad Artist: He grows obsessed with spirals soon after Shuichi's father plants the idea in his head, though he doesn't go nearly as crazy.
- Soul-Powered Engine: His pottery begins inexplicably forming spiral patterns while it dries in the kiln once he switches to using mud from Dragonfly Pond. It's eventually revealed that the reason for this is the mud contains the souls of those whose ashes sank into the pond after their cremations.
- Taken for Granite: What ultimately becomes of him along with his wife, turned to stone and trapped in the Spiral City.
- Unexplained Recovery: After having apparently had the Spiral Curse passed to him from Shuichi's father, he suddenly seems to regain his sanity after Shuichi destroys his kiln. He still appreciates making spiral pottery, but he is nowhere near as obsessed with it as Mr. Saito was.
Mrs. Goshima
Click here for her ultimate fate
Kirie's mother.
- Taken for Granite: What ultimately becomes of her along with her husband, turned to stone and trapped in the Spiral City.
- Unfazed Everyman: She has disturbingly little reaction to the revelation that her husband has been using mud imbued with the ashes of the dead in his pottery, much less having made them into a plate to serve food on.
Mr. Saito
Click here for his ultimate fate
Voiced by: Takashi Matsuyama (JP)
Shuichi's father, whose growing obsession with spirals plunges his family's life into despair.
- And I Must Scream: His spirit, along with dozens of other souls, is trapped in Mr. Goshima's clay urns when the latter uses mud from Dragonfly Pond to perfect his art. Kirie peers into the oven one night and sees their screaming, writhing faces among the flames, begging for help from the heat. Thankfully, they're presumably freed when Shuichi destroys her father's oven.
- Collector of the Strange: He takes up collecting objects with spiral patterns and shapes. And "strange" is probably the nicest way you can describe him.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Grows insanely obsessed with the nightmarish pattern, to the point where he starts making spirals on his own body.
- Our Ghosts Are Different: After his death, he manifests to his poor wife as a horrifying spiral spirit, trying to persuade her to join him in the spiral. Which she does after falling into insanity and death.
- Parents as People: Taken to the worst possible extreme. Mr. Saito neglects his family in favor of his love of the Spiral, and it proves his undoing.
- Rubber Man: Very much played for horror. As his sanity spirals out of control, Saito develops the ability to warp his body parts into spiral shapes. It ultimately leads to him contorting his whole body into a spiral shape inside a tub, which breaks his spine and kills him.
- Small Role, Big Impact: Saito dies in the first chapter, but his lingering spirit continues to haunt his family, and the tragedy of his falling to the spiral continues to drive and haunt Shuichi.
Mrs. Saito
Click here to see her with her head shaved
Shuichi's mother who, after her husband's death, develops a paralyzing fear of spirals.
- Baldness Means Sickness: Not in a physical sense, but her mental sickness compels her to shave her head in order to escape the spiral in her hair bun.
- Body Horror: Her fear of spirals is so intense and indiscriminate that she begins mutilating herself in order to remove any trace of the spiral from her body, culminating in her attempting to dig out her cochlea with a pair of scissors after learning that it's shaped like a spiral.
- Creepy Centipedes: She first learns that her inner ear is shaped like a spiral when a centipede that's possibly possessed by her husband's spirit attempts to crawl into her ear and curl up in the spiral inside.
- Fingore: She cuts off her fingerprints in her attempts to rid herself of the spiral.
- From Bad to Worse: Her attempt to rid her body of spirals by removing her inner ear only succeeds in making her constantly feel as if she's spiraling due to her lack of balance giving her a continuous sense of vertigo.
- Sanity Slippage: She was a perfectly normal woman, and then she found her husband's mutilated corpse. After that, she developed an intense fear of spirals that ultimately led to her death.
Keiko
Click here to see her cursed by the Spiral
Kirie's cousin.
- Body Horror: A mushroom-dazed doctor puts her baby back in her womb. It's not pretty. But then again neither is the proboscis that has now taken the place of her tongue to allow her to suck blood better from her victims.
- Enfant Terrible: Her baby along with the rest of the babies birthed by the mosquito-bitten women are fully capable of speech and all share a desire to be physically reinserted into their mothers' wombs to such a point that they regrow their placenta soon after it's cut off.
- Express Delivery: She and many other pregnant women get impregnated and give birth in a matter of days.
- I Ate WHAT?!: The "mushrooms" Dr. Kawamoto begins adding to patients' meals are actually cuttings from the placentas the mosquito babies continually grow. It's implied that those who eat them are considered more desirable to the mosquito women, as Kirie never has more than a bite and is overlooked by Keiko in favor of her draining the blood of Kawamoto and other patients who are obsessed with eating the placenta.
- Our Vampires Are Different: As a result of the Spiral somehow impregnating her using male mosquitoes, she and many other afflicted women gain an insatiable thirst for blood to provide nutrients for their babies in their wombs, just as female mosquitoes suck blood so that they can have eggs. Instead of using a needle to poke holes through the skin (like mosquitoes with their probosces) or biting important arteries in the neck, they use hand drills in various places on the victim's body. At night, they seek out blood, but in the day, they act as if nothing is wrong. They give birth to their babies days after being impregnated, and their babies behave more like demonic parasites who hate being outside the womb and want to go back in. On top of this, once Kikio’s baby is reinserted into her womb, her thirst for blood returns with such a fury that she grows a proboscis to suck blood personally.
- Uncertain Doom: It's never made clear what exactly happens to her after Kirie escapes the hospital, as she's last seen draining blood from several placenta-mad patients, but it's unlikely to be anything pleasant.
- Womb Horror: She and the other pregnant women give birth to babies who seem more like parasites — they want to go back into their mothers' wombs because it's warmer there.
The Spiral
The Spiral Entity
Click here to see its incarnation in the Lost Chapter
The source of the Spiral Curse that haunts Kurozu-cho.
- Attention Whore: Shuichi hypothesizes that the Spiral is desperate to be looked at, and its curse is how it forces people to acknowledge it. Kirie and Shuichi’s final act before they succumb to the curse is to be defiant to this nightmare by turning their gazes exclusively at each other instead of the Spiral.
- Cosmic Horror Story: The Lost Chapter reveals that its power extends all the way to the universe itself, being displayed in spiral galaxies that can grant telepathy to those who obverse them and drive them mad before eventually exploding their heads into new miniature galaxies, though it appears only residents of Kurozu-cho can actually see and be affected by them.
- Eldritch Abomination: A massive, sentient spiraling structure that ritually drives the residents of Kurozu-cho insane while twisting them, nature, and even time into spiral-shaped monstrosities.
- Eldritch Location: The labyrinthine ruins under Kurozu-cho where it resides begin the curse that then eventually spreads to the town above until its citizens are pulled underground to be forced to stare at it for eternity.
- Genius Loci: It's a semi-sapient construct that desires to be seen and devours everyone and everything until they're forced to become a part of it.
- Sinister Geometry: A simple spiral shape but capable of literally twisting anyone and anything into a macabre parody of itself.
- Underground City: The spiral city underneath Dragonfly Pond is a sprawling mass of carved stone spires that eventually link up with the surface like a corkscrew once all the residents of Kurozu-cho (except perhaps Mitsuo) are pulled into the catacombs.
Others
Azami Kurotani
Click here to see her cursed by the Spiral
Voiced by: Mariya Ise (JP)
A classmate of Kirie's with a crescent-shaped scar on her forehead. It is rumored amongst other school girls that she uses this scar in order to attract the attention of boys.
- Attention Whore: Azami feeds off of the attention of the boys around Kirie's high school. This is what gets her to start stalking Shuichi when he refuses to get in a relationship with her.
- Face–Monster Turn: A nice, normal girl before the power of the spiral warped her into a Yandere.
- I Love You Because I Can't Control You: Every other boy is interested in her, but when Shuichi refuses to have anything to do with her due to her forehead scar becoming a spiral, she becomes obsessed with him.
Kyoko Sekino
Click here to see her cursed by the Spiral
Click here for her ultimate fate
A classmate of Kirie's who takes an immediate interest when the former develops strange spiral hair patterns with mysterious power. Of course, she soon develops similar gifts...
- Always Someone Better: As she's obsessed with standing out, Sekino grows jealous of how much attention Kirie's cursed do gains her, and one-ups her by styling her own hair into similar spiral patterns.
- Character Development: A small example. Sekino is at first an introverted girl whose curious with getting attention, but eventually devolves into a cackling, power-mad control freak when she gets a taste of the spiral's power.
- Cursed with Awesome: Unlike Kirie, she's thrilled with her prehensile hypnotic hair and the power it gives her over others. It comes with a heavy price, though.
- Deadly Upgrade: Said price being her life, as the new hair eventually drains her energy completely, leaving Sekino a desiccated corpse.
- I Just Want to Be Special: Sekino really wants to stand out among her classmates. Given she's an (initially) average girl living in Kurôuzo-Cho, it's a little understandable.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: She actually makes some pretty good use of her cursed hair against a reluctant Kirie, at least until her powers take their toll.
- Prehensile Hair: Thanks to the Spiral curse, Sekino develops living spiral locks that can entrap people and hypnotize them into a devoted trance.
- Sanity Slippage: So very much. Sekino reaches near supervillain levels of insanity in her mad drive for attention.
- With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Whether it's due to the Spiral Curse or her own pathological needs taking over, Sekino is utterly over the deep end by the time she gives her last breath.
Chie Maruyama
A reporter for Tokyo TV who ends up trapped in Kurozu-cho after the curse seals the town off from the outside world.
- Dropped a Bridge on Him: After several chapters of working with Kirie and Shuichi to try to escape the curse, she ends up sealed inside the row houses just as they finish being built into a complete spiral pattern. As a result, she's pulled into the underground Spiral City along with the rest of the row house residents, presumably cursed to eternally stare at the Spiral.
- The Everyman: She's an outsider who only ended up in Kurozu-cho to report on the typhoons and unfortunately found herself trapped by the curse.
- Nice Girl: Despite having nothing to do with Kurozu-cho or its residents, she never intentionally acts out any sort of malice against anyone. The worst thing she does is free the tied-up children who enjoy causing chaos by creating tornados, but she has no idea how cruel they are at the time.
- Out of Focus: Despite being arguably one of the main characters for several chapters, she only has around two minutes of screentime in the live-action film.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Her freeing the children who enjoy creating tornados upon noticing them tied up was a kind thought, but unfortunately only results in them spreading destruction.
Junji Ito
The manga's author who documents his humorous attempts to study the secrets of spirals.
- Author Avatar: Junji Ito as himself researching spirals in order to draw the manga.
- Bathos: Seeing the mangaka who drew such horrors acting like an easily distracted fool can do a decent job of draining away some of the associated fear from the manga itself.
- Serious Business: He finds researching spirals to be extremely important, much to the chagrin of his editor whom he continually annoys by missing deadlines.
