Uzumaki follows a high-school student, Kirie Goshima; her boyfriend, Shuichi Saito; and the citizens of the small, quiet Japanese town of Kurouzu-cho, (Black Vortex Town), which is enveloped by supernatural events involving spirals. As the story progresses, Kirie and Shuichi witness how the spiral curse affects the people around them, causing the citizens to become either obsessed with or paranoid about spirals, including transforming them into grotesque monsters such as contorting their bodies, making pregnant women to act like mosquitoes, raising the dead, and mutating most of the citizens into snails. The curse also affects Kurouzu's environment as it simultaneously creates whirlwinds and whirlpools, especially turning the abandoned lighthouse into a hot furnace while making whoever looks at it walk in circles.