Here's what you need to know; Kaori's overly sensitive nose is causing conflict between her and her boyfriend, Tadashi while on vacation in Okinawa. However, the source of the troublesome smell turns out to be far worse than the couple could have imagined, as an army of undead fish begins to rise from the deep and swarm the land, bringing with them not just a terrible smell, but something far more evil.
A long time ago, like eight years ago, I wrote about this manga and what I thought about it. At the time though, I wasn't very familiar with manga or with Junji Ito, and I was not a very good writer, not that I am now, but trust me, I was worse then. It was about eight years ago that I was first introduced to Junji Ito and to Gyo while watching an episode of the Rooster Teeth Podcast, in which they discussed a short horror story called The Enigma of Amigara Fault. Their discussion of the story intrigued me and that night, I tracked it down and gave it a read, and then I didn't sleep. It was my first real introduction to horror manga, to manga in general, and it messed with me real good. That was eight years ago and since then, I've had a lot more experience with manga, scooping up and reading Battle Angel Alita, All You Need Is Kill, Kaiju No.8, and perhaps most prominently, the works of Junji Ito, a horror mangaka known for his freaky, insane, occasionally comedic and often nightmare inducing stories, and I think it's safe to say I'm a fan of his, given that my collection of his works takes up an entire shelf on my bookshelf. It all started with The Enigma of Amigara Fault though, and by extension, with Gyo, a story that's equal parts horror, science fiction, and acid trip that was the first book of Ito's I ever bought, and after recently picking up PTSD Radio and getting back into reading manga, I thought it would be fun to go back to Ito and his zombie fish, and to look a bit closer at this bizarre and disgustingly unique apocalypse, and I will be going into some detail about the story of the manga, so be warned if you don't want spoilers.
Gyo opens with our main character, Tadashi diving near a shipwreck and narrowly avoiding sharks, taking the chance to taunt the sharks for not being able to catch him, which is quite cool. But before being chased by sharks, Tadashi has a mysterious encounter with another thing on the ocean floor, an impossibly fast object that flies right past him like a torpedo, a peculiar encounter which I'm sure won't become relevant later. Once back on the boat, we meet his girlfriend, Kaori, who's not too happy about being on a boat and wants to go home. It turns out that Kaori has a sensitive nose, and is upset by the smell of the sea and particularly of fish which, again, I'm sure won't be relevant later. But we quickly learn that her sensitive nose is not your average cute quirk; her intolerance of bad smells is a major point of contention for the couple that blows up when they get back to the house, where Tadashi is infuriated by her demand that he brush his teeth ten times a day just so he can kiss her. When I first read this, I was a lot more sympathetic to Tadashi, having just got out of a relationship with an equally clingy and unreasonable girl. But reading it now, and when looking at it in hindsight with how the story goes, I find myself feeling sympathy for both of our main characters, and I'm surprised by how well done parts of their story are.
Typically, Ito's characters are not so much characters as they are vehicles for us; our guide through the weird and twisted world Ito has drawn for us, and usually vehicles for whatever commentary or horror Ito has in mind for the story, and Gyo is no exception, but even within his style of character writing, Tadashi and Kaori are surprisingly well written. Other the course of the story, we learn that Kaori comes from a broken family, and that Tadashi puts up with her neuroticism because he wants to take care of her and thinks no one else will if he doesn't, while Kaori clings to Tadashi like a bad smell, demanding he protect her and get rid of the problems around her. The toxicity of this relationship doesn't get the pay off you'd expect it to either, in fact, it's payoff is surprisingly melancholic and understated, certainly surprising for Ito. Kaori is an interesting case in this story because of what happens to her, as Gyo quickly drops the pseudo-science fiction and leans hard into body horror, which is undoubtedly where it's at it's scariest and most fucked up. The body horror aspect is really well done here too, as the Walking Fish, while starting out too outlandish and otherworldly to really be scary, slowly and quietly shift into a far more pernicious threat that our heroes are powerless to fight, being forced to watch as it corrupts and deforms their bodies to suit it's needs.
This corruption is where Ito really shines as an author and it's on full display in Gyo, as well as a few of his other defining traits. One thing that isn't as big an issue in his short stories, but that does become more noticeable in his longer stories is that his characters are not the most complex and, in a lot of cases, not the most likable. I've mellowed on Kaori over the years since I first read this story, but her demanding, neurotic and clingy personality doesn't make her the most likable character, though her fate is made no less twisted and darkly poetic by her just being a bit of a bitch to Tadashi, who puts up with it and stays loyal and protective, even as the world rots around them. Other characters include Tadashi's uncle, a mad scientist who devotes himself to studying and understanding the Walking Fish, and probably knows more about them than he should, he also makes some very crazy decisions over the course of the story. The uncle's payoff is also just plain ridiculous, and had Gyo not already literally jumped the shark several chapters prior, it certainly would have then. But before things get really fucked up, the initial premise is, to put it bluntly, bonkers; as the southern islands of Japan are swarmed by rotting fish, scuttling up onto land on mechanical spider legs.
In addition to the chaos and confusion, some of these fish pose a more serious threat, as Tadashi and Kaori learn when the house they're staying in is attacked by a walking shark, and all of them bring with them a terrible smell, like the smell of a rotting corpse, which is sometimes referred to as the 'Death Stench' over the course of the story. But what I really like about the Walking Fish is how the threat they pose to our characters changes over the course of the story, going from a bizarre, absurd and almost comedic threat that our characters can fight, to an apocalyptic, existential threat that they are powerless against, and the true horror of the Walking Fish unfolds slowly, as the fish rot and melt away and their mechanical legs start to look for new hosts, and this being a manga from Junji Ito, you know that means things are going to get gnarly, and how many pieces of media are there that blend fears of sharks, spiders, germs and violation of the human body, let alone do it as well as Gyo, getting out of the water will not save you here. Another strength of his that's on full display is his ability to take the most outlandish, nonsensical vision and put it on a page, his art is mesmerising and his work in Gyo sells the sheer grossness of the subject matter flawlessly.
It's in the latter half of the story that the really disturbing imagery starts to pop up, and that the body horror aspect of Gyo comes into full effect, and the best word I can use to describe it is gross, it's a dirty, nasty and uncomfortable kind of horror that takes the creepy Walking Fish and ramps it up to eleven. This is when Ito is at his absolute best, when he's presenting you with an insane story, art that is horrible to look at in the best possible way, and imagery and payoffs that leave you feeling violated and anxious. But a problem that comes up in a few of his longer stories, or at least the ones I've read, is that Ito can sometimes go a bit too far in some areas. For example, Tadashi's uncle is a genius scientist and inventor who figures out the Walking Fish before anyone else, but who recalls a war story from his father that is presented as a likely origin for the Death Stench, and deduces that it is, in fact, an Imperial Japanese bioweapon. So far, so sensible, but it's when it takes a turn for the supernatural that things start to go off the rails, as Ito implies that the gas is alive and self aware in his expectedly unsubtle style. And at the point in the story that Tadashi comes across a circus where the performers are all infected, things go completely nuts and the story loses a lot of it's scariness. The circus sequence is among other moments in the manga that come across more funny and silly than scary.
Part of the infection is that the infected produce obscene amounts of gas, which escapes through their orifices, which sounds horrible until you see a dog tied to a table, literally farting and burping itself to death, or more dogs charging an American position while also farting and burping themselves to death. Probably the worst offender of this is a scene where one of the characters attempts to hang themselves after becoming infected, a moment that should be dark and horrific, and that should hit like a freight train, but is kind of ruined when the person in question is farting so hard that they're spinning around on the makeshift noose. There's a lot of tonal inconsistency in Gyo. There are moments that are horrific, there are intense sequences that play on the mind and imagery that burns itself into your brain, and as this apocalypse slowly winds up and becomes more horrific, things only get darker and nastier, but then there are sequences so ridiculous and outlandish that they completely muddle the manga's tone, and I don't know if these moments are supposed to be funny or not, more than anything, they just leave me confused and frustrated. Another issue I have with Gyo is how the first and second halves of the story are split up with a time jump, and how Tadashi is basically told that in the month he was gone, the entire world ended, an apocalypse that would have been really interesting to see unfold, rather than having our main character sleep through it.
Gyo has a lot of great things going on; it has revolting imagery, a bonkers premise and, for most of the story, a genuinely terrifying threat that grows more and more horrific as the story progresses, but there are aspects of the story that are underwhelming or that go a bit too hard into the absurd, and these things, while not out of the ordinary for Ito, sometimes muddle the tone of the manga and hold it back from being truly terrifying. That being said, when Gyo hits, it really hits, with some fantastic body horror and a unique and compelling story that, while not populated with the most likable or complex characters, keeps the action moving forward and keeps the nastiness coming. While it's not Ito's scariest work, or his most insane, Gyo is an incredibly enjoyable and fun read, and had it been released on it's own, it would still be more than worth a read. But Gyo comes with two bonus stories, and it's here where the bang for your buck really comes from. The first of the bonus stories is The Sad Tale of the Principal Post, a little vignette that's only four pages long, yet gives us a depressing and curious mystery of the patriarch of a newly built house getting stuck somewhere he couldn't possibly get stuck, dying before he can tell his family how he got there. The second bonus story however, that's the big one. The Enigma of Amigara Fault was the first of Ito's works I read, it was probably the first of his works that a lot of people read, and that's not a bad thing by any means, because it's probably Ito's best work. The premise of the story is expertly simple; an earthquake opens a fault in a mountain, along which are thousands of holes, perfectly shaped like human silhouettes.
Thousands of people flock to the fault to see the strange holes, including our main characters, Owaki and Yoshida, but as more people come, one by one, they start finding holes that they believe are their silhouettes, they are their holes, made for them and one by one, these people are overcome by a compulsion to enter their holes. This story plays on a lot of common phobias; darkness, entrapment, isolation, claustrophobia, compulsion and a loss of identity, and mixing in some body horror here an there for good measure, all with a premise so elegantly simple and uncomplicated; not bothering to explain what the holes are or why they're there, just presenting the phenomenon to the reader and letting it mess with their minds. It's a story that masterfully burrows it's way into your subconscious and would have left you feeling uncomfortable, even without it's ending. But after playing on your subconscious for a bit, the story jumps ahead a few months to a team of researchers finding the other side of the fault and finding that it also has holes. I'm actually not going to go any further than this because the ending is genuinely something you need to see for yourself, but if it hasn't already been said a thousand times, the ending of The Enigma of Amigara Fault is terrifying, it's honestly one of, if not the scariest thing I've ever read, and even all these years later, I still squirm a little bit when I remember that final panel. Needless to say, it was one hell of a first impression and ever since, I've adored Ito's work.
Drr... Drr... Drr...
Gyo and it's two bonus stories are certainly interesting reads that, for better and for worse, perfectly exemplify Ito's strengths and weaknesses as an artist and storyteller. While the longer story of Gyo goes a bit off the rails as it goes along, and is driven by not especially likable or compelling characters, it is the premise and the art that keeps the reader moving forward, in equal parts excited for and dreading whatever abomination awaits them on the next page. And while Gyo goes a bit too insane for it's own good, it remains a fun, bonkers, disgusting and sometimes frightening little read that I always enjoy coming back to. But it's with The Enigma of Amigara Fault that Ito fires on all cylinders, giving us a short, simple tale that ends on a gut punch that leaves you confused and terrified, without outstaying it's welcome or undermining what makes it so enigmatic and unpleasant with exposition. If nothing else, I can't insist enough that you track down The Enigma of Amigara Fault, it's more than worth it, but if you're ever in a book shop and come across Gyo, it's certainly worth picking up.
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