Gyo

Gyo is a long-form horror manga by Junji Ito, serialized in Shogakukan's Big Comic Spirits from 2001 to 2002. The simplified Chinese edition was released by New Star Press in 2021 as a two-volume boxed set, including two short stories, 'The Sad Tale of the Principal Post' and 'The Enigma of Amigara Fault.' The story begins in Okinawa: a vacationing couple, Tadashi and Kaori, smell a persistent rot by the sea and later find in their hotel a fish covered in decaying flesh, stinking of corpses, and fitted with metallic mechanical legs. The strange fish multiply rapidly and crawl ashore in swarms; even sharks are fitted with walking devices and charge onto the beaches to maul people. The two flee back to Tokyo, only to find that the 'walking fish' have followed them into the city, and the stench filling the air begins to make people's bodies swell, twist, and mutate—an unknown bacterium is spreading. Kaori, fastidious and sensitive, is the first to smell something wrong and the first to be infected. Tadashi searches the collapsing city for his transformed girlfriend, and the clues gradually point to the biological weapons research conducted by Professor Koyanagi's family during the war: the fish were originally engineered biological weapons, and now they return to the world bearing a crime half a century old. The work uses 'stench' as the sensory motif running throughout, weaving ecological pollution, the lingering poison of war, and human arrogance into an inescapable apocalyptic parable; it is one of Junji Ito's few representative works that combines a complete long-form structure with a strong social metaphor.