Junji Ito is inarguably one of the masters of horror manga, utilizing both horror (physical revulsion) and terror (psychological reaction) to create gut-churning tales of the world gone mad. To a degree, he carries this out in his two-volume series Gyo from 2002, here reprinted by Viz in a single hardbacked omnibus...and to a degree he doesn't quite pull it off. You may have noticed that the subtitle of this tale is “The Death-Stench Creeps,” and while terrible smells can be terrifying and sickening, in this case our inner third-graders may have a little more trouble, because essentially the “death-stench” comes from farts.

The story opens with young twenty-somethings Tadashi and Kaori vacationing in Okinawa. The two have taken a boat out so that Tadashi can go scuba diving, and we see him exploring the hulks of battleships on the ocean floor. This is much more important than it at first appears, though it is quickly eclipsed by the appearance of a rotting fish walking on what appear to be spider legs entering their home. The fish is preceded by a terrible smell and is followed by more like it: fish of all sizes, including sharks and squids, are soon creeping out of the sea and towards humanity. Tadashi and Kaori quickly return to Tokyo where Tadashi's uncle tells him about secret wartime weapons experiments carried out by his grandfather, who hatched the plan to use a deadly-smelling gas to incapacitate enemy soldiers. The ship carrying the weapon was sunk, however...and clearly after sixty-odd years, it began to infect the wildlife around it. More horrible is the fact that Kaori soon discovers pustules on her body, leading to the revelation that the gas is infectious to most people, and as the fish rot away, the creeping spider legs pick up some new flatulent passengers.

Most stories, horror or not, sink or swim on how well they are able to suspend our disbelief, no matter how ludicrous the premise. Ito is usually quite good at this, as we can see from the two unrelated short stories included at the end of the book, but somehow Gyo falls a little flat in that regard. This may be because the passing of gas is generally considered comedy fodder, at least in the U.S., so images of people and animals with streams of gas shooting out of their buttocks and mouths looks more juvenile than horrifying, while the tubes that the spider machines implant in those orifices also feel slightly silly. This may well be a cultural difference that simply doesn't work in favor of an English translation, as when you stop to consider the artwork, it really can be scary: bloated not-quite corpses held down by cruel machinery in a nightmarescape of broken buildings and abandoned cars, the air thick with swirling lines that make the world look like Van Gogh's bad dream.

Simply put, this really is the kind of story where mileage will vary based on your particular fears. If you grew up on a working waterfront, the fish and their reported stench will likely seem less scary than if you haven't been exposed to the smell of bait on a regular basis, and if you find fart jokes hilarious, it may be harder to find the scary within Gyo. Regardless of that, Ito does succeed in creating something disturbing in his two chapters about the Citrous Circus, whose ringmaster, like Tadashi, is somehow immune to the gas. He has created a circus of the damned by using the gas-infected as part of the act, with a flame-spitter and a human cannonball based around the deadly infection. To see someone trying to carry on, and perhaps even to profit, during the apocalyptic nightmare, is creepy in and of itself; the acts themselves are downright scary.

Ito's use of stippling and cross-hatching in place of solely using screentones adds a texture to the artwork that helps to bring it to terrible life, and the fact that Tadashi remains almost entirely normal-looking, right down to his clothes, creates a sense of disconnection with the world he's living in, which also helps to enhance the frightening strangeness of the story and its world. Viz's translation reads smoothly in the text, although some of the sound effects are a little more difficult to place. There are no notes, which is a shame only because the name “Kaori” means “fragrant,” adding irony to the story in that not only is she very sensitive to smells, but also she is the first to succumb to the death-stench.

Gyo doesn't have the chilling terror of Uzumaki, or even the included short story “The Enigma of Amigara Fault,” but it is still a fairly successful horror piece. Some of the aspects may be harder to buy than others, but Ito's artwork still hits all the right notes and the surprisingly hopeful ending helps to make the story end in a way that feels fairly believable. It may not be his most effective story, but for horror fans there are still plenty of reasons to give this new hardcover edition a chance.