The Thing That Washed Ashore

[cyberghostface]

Here's another story from Junji Ito. Eight pages out twenty-four. Wouldn't call it NSFW in the traditional sense but it could be considered graphic or disturbing by certain people. It's a bit gooey.

As always, remember to read from right to left.

As the story opens the corpse of a gigantic creature has crashed onto a shore in the Pacific Ocean and has attracted a large crowd.



The narrator, a young girl, hates the ocean because of her fear of creatures like this. It started from a visit to the aquarium where she saw grotesque fish from the deepest corners of the sea. Ever since then her dreams have been populated by such images.

The scientists note that the creature appears to be transparent and has numerous protuberances covering its body.

The protagonist meets another girl who also hates the ocean. She came here because her fiance seven years ago who was shipwrecked at sea and was never found. She has strange dreams about him:



The onlookers realize that they can see something inside the creature's skin.



The scientists note that the people haven't been digested. They begin to cut open the creature.









The people begin moving en masse.


 

Comments

[q99]

Yea, I think 7 years living like a parasite inside a giant fish would leave anyone a bit nutty!

[silverzeo]

Or large amount of their braincells may been destroyed by the lack of oxygen. Seriously, how can SO many people be still be alive being crowded wall to wall inside a fish with a decent amount of oxygen?

[q99]

The fish must extract oxygen from the water and it must provide enough for them.

If there wasn't enough (even mildly not enough, akin to high altitude in the edge of the death zone), they'd all be dead.

[glprime]

And does the fish live at a pressure low enough to be tolerable to people? Not like we have the mechanisms to go from one depth to another very quickly like some species.

[baihu]

I read that fish at the abyssal depths have a certain DNA strand which allows them to hold shape at that depth. Assuming this fish can somehow perform gene therapy on the digested people (which, honestly wouldn't be the most farfetched thing Ito has written), then...meh, maybe.

This is a bit meh on the Junji Ito scale though. At least, I was hoping the people would have transformed into something else; instead they're just mad.

[deleonjh]

I don't see any tennis courts inside that fish's intestines so those people presumably weren't getting any exercise, and seeing as how the vast majority of coma patients die after 2 years - in an environment specifically designed to keep them alive, by the way - then there should be only like two survivors left from living under the sea.

But hey, Junji Ito found the realistic endpoint of the tale of Jonah and the whale, so props for that.

[q99]

They can wiggle and move around and such. That's... well, it's activity, even if it's not precisely exercise.

One could also blame weird chemicals or such produced by the critter. Medically, I'm sure it must be fascinating.