Junji Ito – Gyo (2002) Manga Review

Gyo is a horror tale based around the idea: wouldn’t it suck if sharks suddenly got legs? That’s basically it, or, at least, how it starts. The story starts on the tropical island Okinawa where a young couple gets terrorised by stinking fish that crawl on land on skittering insect legs and invade their home. They flee back to Tokyo, but soon all of Japan is under siege by stinking insect fish. Serves them right for eating all that sushi. It’s the result of some bio-experiment gone wrong, and soon humans too are affected by whatever the fish are affected by, and then the body horror begins.

Gyo is a bit middle of the road for Junji Ito. It doesn’t have the invention and cosmic horror of Uzumaki, nor does it offer the food for thought thematically that Tomie had. I found the story a bit silly, really. Ito starts it off very slowly with a gradual increase of horror as the fish just stalk behind closets and couches, but the fish on legs didn’t seem all that scary to me. When we get an explanation for why all this is happening, it doesn’t really mesh with what we’ve already seen in the story. What’s worse is that the boy and girl were very annoying as main characters. They kept bickering and yelling at each other in irrational and repetitive ways, and all I could hope for was that they would become the first victims of whatever was going on.

Around the halfway point of the hardback (which is at the start of the second volume of the two-volume series before the omnibus existed) Junji Ito goes full in with creepiness, grossness and body horror. One moment you see little fishies walk around on their cute little legs, and the next moment, whammo! Puffed up human corpses walking around on spider legs with tubes going into their mouth and arse. There is also a supernatural element that has to do with the ghosts of the Second World War that inhabit the death stench of these bio-mechanical legs, but that element had no real emotional bite to it in the story.

Ito knows that the story doesn’t make much sense because he has a character saying that after struggling to formulate an explanation on the final pages. Then the story just ends without resolution. Gyo doesn’t have the heft of his other major works. It was mostly just gross, with farthing corpses.

In fact, the best story of the omnibus is the final bonus story called The Enigma of Amigara Fault, which is the most terrifying story I’ve ever read in comic form. It combines feelings of doom, terror and claustrophobia, all inside a cosmic horror story that genuinely upset me. The story is about a cliff face that opened up in the mountains with countless of human shaped holes. The holes correspond to the exact silhouettes of the people who felt compelled to travel to the cliff. People find their own holes, fit into them, get stuck and get sucked inside.