[Categories: Manga Reviews]
Gyo volume #2: the deeper vileness
It’s been a short but gleefully twisted journey, this - Gyo has in turns been sickening, cheesy, funny and imaginative but with some genuine scares along the way. No matter how serious the plight of our hapless hero was, I still couldn’t take the whole thing entirely seriously: everything from the concept to the execution shows an intuitive knowledge on the part of the author in regards to what makes for a good horror tale but it seems to keep its tongue firmly in cheek.
The second volume got off to a bit of a faltering start with a large jump forward in the timeline, which threw the continuity a bit; I would have liked to have seen the situation progressively worsen, especially with Ito’s striking and detailed art style. It turns out that even after falling unconscious in a pit of dead sea life, Tadashi is even more intent on finding poor Kaori, who is infected with the deadly disease. At this point I ought to give a fuller synopsis but if I outlined cows with mechanical legs, a Death Stench Circus and an airship that runs on pure stink, you’d think I was making it up, right? Truth be told, I couldn’t even begin to come up with half the stuff that Ito does - he’s not afraid to put his characters through extremely unpleasant experiences either. Take for example the Death Stench machines that run on the gas: they draw it from BOTH ENDS of the the victims, which is some sight to behold, I can assure you.
Half the fun of Gyo is being surprised at every twist that ups the ‘ekk’ factor, as Ito presents us with increasingly outlandish and shocking images of the Death Stench’s effects; just when you think it can’t get any more extreme, it does. The ideas used here are indeed outlandish, which might put off fans of more serious horror and sci-fi but in terms of twisted camp fun this is hard to beat. The Death Stench Circus was pushing my suspension of disbelief a bit for instance, seemingly playing on dumb shocks and base reactions of revulsion; I can’t deny it the acknowledgement that it was effective though.
The brand of horror, as it were, in Gyo is that of a very visceral and graphic variety which goes for gut reactions in the audience in a very literal sense. You are encouraged to ignore the finer plot points and take a “I can’t believe he just did that!” stance, as it plays on basic fears of nature and what lurks in the unknown depths of the sea. Let’s face it, some sea creatures look disgusting and alien to begin with, so mashing this together with the safe familiarity of dry land using bizarre mechanical contraptions is a startling and memorable unholy marriage of the organic and man-made. Unlike a lot of modern chillers and thrillers, Gyo aims right for the animalistic instincts of the reader that work at a more basic and primeval level than human reason and logic - it’s not a sophisticated approach perhaps but in it’s own limited way this is sure as hell effective.
At the end of it all though, Gyo was a little too outrageous as a ‘scary story’ for my tastes so it won’t be having me checking behind my door for Fish With Legs before I go to bed at night. Nevertheless it was good cheesy fun in a similar manner to the B-movie schlock that features bad acting, questionable budgets and dollops of cheap and simple-but-effective entertainment. The final chapters felt a bit rushed though, almost as if Ito realised how the shock value can diminish over time so dropped his normal examplerary approach to pacing and wrapped it all up before the novelty of the premise wore off. It’s a little abrupt but offers Kaori some semblance of dignity and humanity towards the end, if not much.
What may be of even greater interest than the conclusion to the Gyo story itself is the bonus material contained in this second volume. The first is a short piece called The Sad Tale of the Principal Post, which isn’t so much as scary as downright odd. It feels like a snapshot of a Twilight Zone episode for its weirdness, but vanishes from your mind as quickly as it arrived, leaving a sense of unsettled bemusement behind afterwards. In some ways it feels like Ito was just doodling with ideas and tossed this particular one out just for the sheer hell of it.
The other is a slightly longer one-shot tale, The Riddle of Amigara Fault. This also has too narrow a premise to warrant a multiple chapter narrative like Gyo but again its impact is considerable when contained in the format of a single chapter. The danger and mystery of dark, confined spaces is high up on the list of anyone’s deepest fears; a fact not lost on this manga short which once again demonstrates Ito’s masterful grasp of what scares readers at a more profound and irrational level. The fact that the story is too short to fully explain the origins of the strange human-shaped holes and their purpose actually works in the favour of its power to unnerve and disturb the reader; it sticks in the mind every bit as well as Gyo’s infamous Walking Fish of Okinawa.
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