“Devoured from Head to Toe”: Nature and Consumption in Junji Ito’s Gyo and Uzumaki

Junji Ito’s graphic narratives Gyo and Uzumaki foreground the—literal and figurative—consumption of human beings. While neither focuses on traditional monstrous perpetrators of human devouring—such as zombies or vampires—they both draw on the traditions of horror and weird fiction in order to question the conventional divide between the human and the monstrous. Their employment of the grotesque works not merely to create a horrific image but to suggest that horror itself is part and parcel of the natural world.  

In this paper I am particularly interested in the way in which the two manga frame the relationship between human consumption and the natural world. In Gyo, this is largely framed as an act of revenge—nature itself, scientists claim, has created monstrous sea creatures with metal legs to end humanity, possibly as a result of Japanese war crimes—while in Uzumaki an ancient type of cosmic horror infects both humans and the natural world, rendering the former monstrous and the latter complicit in its designs. In both Gyo and Uzumaki, humanity largely devolves into a mass of undifferentiated grotesquerie, while nature—though transformed by the logic of the weird—is allowed to endure.