“Gyo” // Beware of a stench that’s permeating Okinawa… // As I did with a lot of Junji Ito’s works, I went into this completely blind and had no idea the batshit adventure I had gotten myself involved in. In this story, we follow our MC Tadashi, who is on a boat with this girlfriend Kaori. Tadashi sees something creepy in the water and Kaori complains of the smell so they return to the home they’re staying in. But the disgusting rotten fish smell (ugh, every time they described the smell I started to feel like I was smelling it) doesn’t seem to go away. And then they find this creepy dead fish with legs skittering around the place. They think they kill it and bury it outside but it returns. It specifically drives Kaori crazy. And then it gets worse: all the marine animals seem to gain legs and come up onto land, including huge monsters like a great white shark with legs. The couple returns to the city in the hopes they’ve avoided the monsters but they start spreading all over town. Tadashi gives one of the beasts he captures to his uncle, who studies it — losing his arm in the process when the legs he took off the fish disconnect and latch onto him. He explains to Tadashi that years ago, his grandfather had developed a chemical weapon with a stench to fight their enemies in war, but the machines were on a boat that sunk and they all went into the see — clearly they attached onto the sea animals. (I listened to a podcast where they mentioned the legs look like a Venus fly trap, or a bear trap, or even like face huggers, which is very creepy. And the fact the uncle couldn’t help but put his arm in, like it was sucking him in, reminded me of “The Enigma of Amigara Fault,” which just so happens to be a short story at the end of this book.) Kaori ends up getting sick and the stench ends up coming out of her. Ewww. They try to take her to the hospital but the fish have taken over Tokyo. Tadashi gets injured and ends up in a coma for a month, and in that time Kaori has just gotten worse. She now has all these tubes sticking out of her on those weird mechanical legs. It’s not just her though — all the people sick are turning into these things. It’s soooo gross. Then there are these random weird chapters with a circus??? The body horror is literally THRIVING in this story. It’s pretty gross. Anyway, we find out the circus people have captured Kaori, and Tadashi helps her by shutting off her machine, and then tries to bring her back to his uncle’s. But he learns from his uncle’s assistant that he’s dead…. But he’s not! His body has actually been secured by another big machine of his own making, which comes alive and then goes crazy when it sees Tadashi and his assistant together because he think they’re romantically involved. And Kaori does the same thing when she sees them together, which begs the question, are they still, like, conscious of what’s happening to their bodies? That’s what’s the story is implying, which is terrifying in itself. His uncle escapes and carries off the assistant, and Kaori also flees, leaving Tadashi alone. Everywhere he looks, there are these creepy people and creatures scuttling about, deteriorating. But he does run into these young scientists who are trying to work on a cure for the gas, and Tadashi joins them, but not before finding Kaori’s corpse and telling her she’s finally escaped the horrible smells she hates so much… I guess in the end it’s kind of a hopeful ending, but not a happy one. I mean, hopefully the cure can be found? I still have questions, like how I ate some people like Tadashi immune? Was his uncle’s story about how this started true? Why now? I’m not mad that I read this at all but I don’t think it’s my favorite of Junji Ito stories. I do like how it’s pretty much a linear story from start to finish, but I wanted a bit more suspense and the body horror was intense. For example, I kind of wish that the reveal of how the machines were created from the war was discovered at the ends because that felt like a pretty big creepy reveal that was dropped pretty early.