Gyo follows the increasingly grotesque misfortunes of Tadashi, a young man enjoying a seaside getaway with his girlfriend at his uncle’s coastal home when an inexplicably foul smell begins to fill the air. This isn’t your standard low-tide whiff — it’s an invasive, putrid stench that sends his already-germaphobic girlfriend into a spiral. Soon after, accompanied by strange swooshing noises, Tadashi spots the first of what becomes a full-blown invasion: a dead fish scuttling across the land on mechanical metal legs.
From there, the story escalates at a breathless pace. The oceans disgorge swarms of corpse-fish, each clattering across the mainland on their eerie, insect-like rigs. The worsening smell serves as a harbinger of what’s coming next — and the stink only intensifies as the walking sea creatures multiply. Before long, Tadashi finds himself fleeing a massive land-stalking shark that quite literally storms up a flight of stairs after him in one of the more memorably tense scenes.
As the narrative progresses, Ito leans fully into body horror, gradually revealing the origins of the legged contraptions and the increasingly monstrous consequences of their spread. The story gets darker and more viscerally disgusting the further it goes.
As with any Junji Ito work, the storytelling is inseparable from the art. The panels are intricately detailed, disturbingly imaginative, and frequently revolting in the best possible way. The sheer amount of labour that must have gone into each page is staggering. I happened to read Gyo while spending the weekend on a nearby idyllic island, listening to the ocean outside as I immersed myself in a tale of land-invading sharks – an unexpectedly perfect setting.
And yet… I still don’t love Junji Ito’s works overall. This isn’t my first attempt, and while I appreciate the visual craft and imagination, the underlying storylines don’t fully grab me. This is perhaps a cultural gap, perhaps just personal taste. That said, I’m genuinely glad I read Gyo. It’s disgusting, creative, and thoroughly entertaining.
Thanks to Cannonball Read (and a highlighted review I stumbled across) for putting it on my radar.
Three fish farts out of five.