Gyo

A young couple holidaying on Okinawa encounter a smell, and then a fish walking on a set of metal legs. More follow, in increasing numbers and sizes, until the coastline and eventually Tokyo are overrun.

The two volumes follow Tadashi and Kaori through the collapse, and into an explanation involving wartime biological research.

It begins with one fish on legs. It does not stop there.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

The idea is initially comic — a fish with a walking frame is funny before it is anything else — and Ito escalates it with complete commitment until it is not.

The trajectory from absurd to horrifying is the work's method, and it is executed faster and more brutally than in Uzumaki.

The series' most effective device is olfactory: the creatures are propelled by a gas produced by decomposition, and the stench precedes them.

Horror in a visual medium rarely engages smell, and Ito's insistence on it — characters gagging, covering faces, unable to escape it — gives the book a specific physical unpleasantness.

The explanation involves Japanese biological weapons research and a mechanism developed to deliver pathogens, which places the horror in a specific historical frame.

The connection is thinly developed and functions more as a gesture than as an argument, but it gives the absurdity a grounding that pure invention would not.

Tadashi and Kaori's deteriorating relationship runs alongside the disaster, and her transformation is the series' cruellest sequence.

Ito is generally uninterested in character, and this is one of the few cases where a relationship carries genuine weight, largely through how casually it is destroyed. The series is also unusually direct about how quickly affection curdles into disgust when a body stops behaving as expected.

Two volumes, extremely fast, with almost no downtime between escalations.

It is considerably more relentless than Uzumaki and correspondingly less atmospheric. Readers who found the earlier work slow will prefer this; readers who valued its dread will not. Ito compresses into two volumes what a more patient horror would spread across six, and the result is closer to a disaster film than to a ghost story.

The same precise, heavily hatched style, applied to machinery and rotting flesh in combination.

The mechanical legs are a genuinely good design: crude, improvised-looking and plainly not built for the creatures wearing them, which is much of why they unsettle. The contrast between clean mechanical rendering and rotting organic detail is the visual joke the whole book rests on, and it does not wear out.

The series is frequently funny and is aware of it, and the humour is closer to the surface than in Ito's other work.

Whether this helps is contested. Some readers find the tonal instability effective; others find that it prevents the horror from ever fully landing.

The English edition includes two unrelated stories, The Enigma of Amigara Fault among them, which is frequently named as the single most disturbing thing Ito has drawn.

Amigara Fault is considerably stronger than the main feature, and a number of readers buy the volume for it alone.

It is generally placed below Uzumaki and Tomie in Ito's work, on grounds of thinner characterisation and a weaker ending.

Its admirers argue that the relentlessness is the point and that judging it by the earlier work's standards misses what it is doing. It is nevertheless the Ito work most frequently recommended to readers who found Uzumaki too slow, and the recommendation is a reasonable one.

A single deluxe hardcover collects both volumes and the accompanying short stories at a good size.

As with the rest of Ito's work, the larger reproduction matters, since the detail in the hatching carries a substantial part of the effect. The collected volume is also the cheapest entry point into his work, which matters for readers testing whether the register suits them at all.

Readers who want fast, escalating, physically unpleasant horror and are not looking for atmosphere or character.

It is short and complete. Readers new to Ito are usually better served starting with Uzumaki or with a short-story collection, and returning to this if they want more.