Uzumaki manga ending: Kirie and Shuichi's fate, explained

The Uzumaki manga ending is one of those cases where things are left to interpretation, and situations such as Kirie and Shuichi’s fate is a prime example of that. Written and drawn by Junji Ito, one of the most celebrated mangaka in recent decades, the Uzumaki manga ending is a conglomeration of everything that the mangaka was aiming for: normal people in a normal town struggling against supernatural entities.

In that regard, the situation of Kirie and Shuichi in the Uzumaki manga ending is discussed to this very day, which is worth pointing out because the series ended in 1999. This highlights the staying power of Ito’s magnum opus. However, what happened to these two characters? What was their fate at the end of the story? Let’s find out.

Disclaimer: This article contains massive spoilers for the Uzumaki series.

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Explaining a part of the Uzumaki manga ending

To understand the Uzumaki manga ending, explaining the series as a whole needs to be done to comprehend the context in a better fashion.

There is an entity in the town of Kurouzu-cho called spirals, which are supernatural beings that have existed for a long time, even preceding the city itself. However, after time passes, the spirals need to reconstruct themselves and this leads to them taking over people’s bodies, killing their families, and engaging in many other heinous acts, making a lot of townsfolk feel that the place is cursed.

Kirie and Shuichi are lovers and one of the main characters in the tales, trying to figure out what is happening in Kurouzu-cho and find out the truth about the curse. The interesting thing Ito does is that he never explains the origins of the spirals, where they come from, or how to stop them, which feeds into the hopeless and inevitable feeling of the story as a whole.

By the end of the story, Kirie and Shuichi give up hope and decide to embrace the other while they are consumed by the spirals. The beautiful nature of their relationship, followed by their tragic ending has often left a bad taste in the mouths of readers, but there is more to the story.

Kirie is known to be the narrator of the story and there are theories about how she can tell the story if she didn’t make it past the ending. However, this in itself can be interpreted in a lot of different ways: perhaps she is telling the story as the events are happening or perhaps it is just a technique by Ito to narrate the story.

Regardless, the likeliest ending for the story is that both Kirie and Shuichi embraced their fate and were consumed by the spirals, becoming a part of them in the process. This, in a way, fits with the tragic and darksome nature of the manga as a whole.

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Final thoughts

The Uzumaki manga ending is one of the most controversial in the medium because it leads to a lot of interpretations and a lot of readers have said that Kirie and Shuichi deserved a much better fate, although the nature of the story was aiming for something a lot more tragic. Be that as it may, Junji Ito crafted a masterful horror story that has withstood the test of time.