Gyo

Gyo
North American cover of the first volume
ギョ
Genre	Horror, Science fiction
Manga
Written by	Junji Ito
Published by	Shogakukan
English publisher	Viz Media
Demographic	Seinen
Magazine	Big Comic Spirits
Original run	2001 – 2002
Volumes	2
Original video animation
Directed by	Takayuki Hirao
Studio	Ufotable
Licensed by	Aniplex of America Hanabee[1] Terracotta Distribution[2] I-ON New Media[3]
Released	February 15, 2012
Runtime	71 minutes

Gyo (ギョ, Fish) is a horror manga by Junji Ito. It also includes a pair of bonus stories, titled The Enigma of Amigara Fault and The Sad Tale of the Principal Post. An anime adaptation by Ufotable was released on February 15, 2012.^[4]

Plot

The plot of Gyo centers around the "death stench", a revolting smell first encountered in connection with creatures appearing to be the corpses of bizarre fish with scuttling, sharp metal legs. At first they appear merely as smaller fish, but later also as larger sea creatures such as sharks and even a whale.

The creatures are eventually revealed to consist of a small metallic, multi-legged structure with the carcass of a dead animal (and later, human) strapped on top. Germs infecting the rotting body produce a gas - responsible for the terrible smell that surrounds the creatures - that makes the metal construct move.

Later, it is found that the Japanese Army was researching germs that produce the death stench during World War II in a desperate effort to turn the tide of the war. Infection by the germ produced large amounts of foul-smelling gas from body tissue, and since infection quickly killed the test animals, walking machines were built to carry them farther, allowing them to reach and sicken enemy troops. Enemy planes sunk the ship carrying the prototypes for the walking machines, which ran entirely on the gas.

Underwater the machines have attached themselves to the fish and moved from the island to the mainland, attacking the humans. Later it is found that the death stench gas might have a will of its own, and that the machines are not man-made: the disease has apparently mutated to be able to construct the walkers from the metal hulls of sunken battleships.

Characters

Tadashi

Main character of Gyo. In the beginning it is shown that he loves scuba diving. He has a girlfriend named Kaori and an uncle named Koyanagi. He notices something funny when Kaori says he has bad breath, although he brushes his teeth twice a day. He tries to save Kaori but in the end he fails to do so. He is trying to help with the fight against the creatures. At the end he joins a group of university students, who happen to be immune from the death stench, to create a vaccine to defeat the disease. He's the only survivor of the main characters and appears to be immune.

In the anime version, Tadashi becomes infected and is turned into a custom made walking corpse by Koyanagi. The machine later turns against Koyanagi and kills him before escaping.

Kaori

Tadashi's girlfriend. She has an extremely sensitive nose and becomes very jealous when Tadashi is near other women. Near the beginning of the series Kaori started noticing the odd smell. She and Tadashi tried to escape and went to Koyanagi's lab. Due to her overly sensitive nose, she seems to be able to sense when the creatures are coming. However, she is later infected, causing her body to swell up and be covered in boils. The germ also forces the gas with the "death stench" out of her body, because of this, she began to think she was disgusting, that Tadashi wouldn't love her if she wasn't beautiful, and she would never be healed. This, along with the horrible stench, made her attempt to hang herself from the wires of a ceiling lamp. But the wires were weak and could not support her additional weight with the gas bloating her. Tadashi then immediately carries her to his uncle Koyanagi's lab for aid. Koyanagi rigs her up to a custom walking machine and ultimately, she becomes like the walking dead creatures, except for one quality - she has a will of her own. Later she gets captured by the Citrous Circus, whose ringmaster was using the infected creatures and humans along with the gas, as attractions. Kaori escapes and flees. Tadashi dragged her back to Uncle Koyanagi's lab . But when she escaped outside again after thinking Tadashi was now attracted to Ms. Yoshiyama, she was attacked by the other creatures. It is likely that this was because they saw her man-made walking machine as a threat to their existence. Near the end of the series, Tadashi finds her burnt corpse, commenting on how she is 'finally rid of the smell she hated'.

In the anime adaptation, Kaori is made into the main character instead of Tadashi. She also possesses the unexplained immunity to the infected creatures' poisons.

Doctor Koyanagi

Uncle of Tadashi, an inventor and has an assistant, Ms. Yoshiyama. He tries to figure out what makes the fish move. He once smelled a human corpse, relating the stench to the stench of the creatures. It was his father who died of a heart attack in a factory during a hot summer. While dissecting the fish he notices that although the fish is dead the walker's legs still function. When he gets too close, the legs then clamp onto him. He cuts off his arm to prevent the infection from spreading to the rest of his body. He is fascinated by the machine, not caring that he lost an arm to it. He is mortally wounded when he is stabbed by the spider-like leg of Kaori's walker, but manages to enter a large hangar labelled as "Lab #2". Here, he attaches himself to a modified version of the mechanical legs, equipped with a zeppelin-like air balloon and a housing for a second person on the underside. Thus transformed, he tries to kill Tadashi and Yoshiyama, presumably because he assumed that Tadashi and Ms. Yoshiyama had become partners, but fail. Outside, he waited for them to leave the building, and took Yoshiyama with him before flying away. He is last seen as the Citrous circus and other walking machines attempt to bring him down by gas cannon; they manage to puncture his balloon, but his machine extends metallic wings and escapes.

In the anime Koyanagi is shown as an antagonist who went insane and connected an infected Tadashi to the custom Walker.

Ms. Yoshiyama

Assistant of Doctor Koyanagi, she cares for him and tries to help him. When she was seen with Tadashi by Kaori, Kaori tried to attack her. Ms. Yoshiyama then ran outside where she was captured by the Mechanical Koyanagi. Her final fate is never truly revealed; however, in the last moments of the series, her motionless body is seen connected to Doctor Koyanagi's flying machine. She does not appear in the anime adaptation.

Tsuyoshi Shirakawa

A freelance videographer, appears only in the anime adaption, Kaori met him in the airplane to Tokyo. Follows Kaori just to get to the location of doctor Koyanagi to get his research data. Got infected at the end of the anime before sending Kaori away to a group of survivors.

Aki

Friend of Kaori, appears only in the anime adaption. She is meek and slightly overweight and feels unattractive, appears to be bullied by Erika. Turned into a walker at the end of the anime.

Erika

Friend of Kaori, appears only in the anime adaption, an outgoing and attractive girl who has no difficulty attracting other men, and appears to be picking on Aki all the time. She gets infected by the walkers early on. Aki bludgeoned her to death with an ashtray, but she appears to be alive again later on.

List of chapters

Bonus stories

The Enigma of Amigara Fault

The Enigma of Amigara Fault
阿弥殻断層の怪 (Amigara Dansō no Kai)
Genre	Horror, Science fiction
Manga
Written by	Junji Ito
Published by	Shogakukan
English publisher	Viz Media
Demographic	Seinen
Published	2002
Volumes	1

The Enigma of Amigara Fault (阿弥殻断層の怪, Amigara Dansō no Kai, Amigara means "Empty Shell") is a short story of people being unnaturally drawn into a mountainside fault. It was published along with the second volume of Gyo, but has nothing to do with the story.

Plot

The story begins as two young hikers named Owaki and Yoshida meet on Amigara Mountain, in Japan. They had both seen the mountain featured on the news, and wanted to investigate the story for themselves. Recently, an earthquake had split the mountain and raised a large cliff face from the rocks. Carved into the cliff face are thousands of deep holes shaped like life-sized human silhouettes. The phenomenon, as Owaki and Yoshida discuss, has been the focus of international attention since it was discovered.

The two reach the fault, and find a large crowd of people gathered there. Scientists examine the holes and decide that they could not have occurred naturally, but cannot figure out where they came from. The human-shaped tunnels reach far into the mountain's depths.

Owaki notices Yoshida looking for something, and she tells Owaki about how she had glimpsed a hole on TV that was shaped exactly like her. A man named Nakagaki overhears, and tells the same story. He has already found his hole, and as the two teenagers watch, he strips off his clothes and slips inside. The hole is angled slightly downwards, and Nakagaki slides deep into the mountain as the crowd watches in horror. A rescue squad attempts to go in after him, but the man sent into the hole to rescue Nakagaki is forced to turn back after going in only five meters.

Owaki pitches a tent and sleeps on the mountain, but has nightmares about Nakagaki being stuck hundreds and hundreds of feet deep into the hole, crying out for help but unable to escape or be helped. When he wakes up, he finds Yoshida, who has found her own hole. Suddenly, there is a commotion. Another man has climbed up the wall in his underwear, and is clinging to a hole shaped like him. The crowd yells at him to get down, but he cries out "This is my hole! It was made for me!" before entering. Several other persons start entering holes, and Yoshida becomes frantic. She's convinced the hole is calling out to her. To calm Yoshida, Owaki fills it with small rocks. They then go to his tent, where they retire.

That night, Owaki has another nightmare. He dreams he is a criminal in a prehistoric times. His punishment—a death sentence really—is to enter into a hole shaped like him. As he moves down the tunnel, the shapes in the rock for his neck and limbs begin to stretch, and his body deforms along with it. Soon his entire body is long and thin; his limbs look the shape of tentacles and even his head is several feet long. Amidst all this, he remains alive, writhing in agony.

Owaki awakens from his nightmare in terror. He discovers Yoshida is missing. He leaves the tent to investigate, and sees she has removed the rocks from her hole and entered it. He calls for her, but there is no response. Saddened and confused, he suddenly sees his own hole. Sullenly, he disrobes and fits himself into it.

Several months later, another cliff face is discovered on the other side of the mountain, parallel to the first one. This one has holes as well, but not the perfect human silhouettes that the other side had. They are vaguely human, but the limbs are so thin and stretched out that they resemble worms rather than arms or legs. A science team has arrived to investigate. One worker shines his flashlight into one of the holes. To his horror, he sees something alive very slowly coming down the tunnel—its face twisted and squashed against the rock, its arms extended to unnatural lengths and curved.

The Sad Tale of the Principal Post

The Sad Tale of the Principal Post (大黒柱悲話, Daikokubashira Hiwa) is the twentieth chapter of the manga "Gyo". The short story starts with a group of family and friends celebrating the completion of a family's new home. Once the celebration is underway, the daughter of the man who built the house is alarmed when she hears cries for help emanating from somewhere in the house. She quickly announces, "That sounds like Dad!"

At once, the guests and family members proceed in search of the source of the cries for help. After realizing they are emanating from the crawlspace in the basement, they head downstairs. When they get there, they are astonished to find the father pinned beneath the principal post of the house. Somehow, under precarious circumstances, he found himself trapped with the whole weight of the house crushing him.

The daughter suggests calling a carpenter, but the father is reluctant to accept help in removing himself, fearing the structure would entirely collapse. He doesn't want to see the new home for his family, which they adore, destroyed by removing him. His final decision is to be left there since he is going to die anyway. Later in the evening, he dies while the friends and family watch over him. A shrine is kept by the principal post in honor of his final brave act to save the house. It's never revealed how the father got under the post in the first place.

References

External links

• Official website of Gyo anime (Japanese)
• Gyo (manga) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia
• Gyo (anime) at Anime News Network's Encyclopedia