Guu

Guu is a small girl of the same age as Haré, with no known relatives and no confirmed origin.

Her background remains a complete mystery and is never revealed by the end of the story.

According to the author, she is a character who moves freely under a basically "anything goes" concept.

That description fits her perfectly, because she constantly bends the rules of the setting.

She is usually depicted with pale pink-blond hair close to white, cut in a bob.

She is slightly smaller than other children her age.

Her eyes are typically shown with visible white around the iris, giving her a sharp, unsettling look.

She is usually expressionless, unfriendly, and oddly cynical.

At first meetings, however, she can act charming and polite.

Following Weda's advice that a good first impression helps people get along, she sometimes presents herself as a cute, well-behaved girl with a more conventionally beautiful face.

She can also transform into an adult form.

In that state she remains emotionally unreadable, but becomes a tall, long-haired, strikingly beautiful woman with a refined appearance and a different voice.

In some descriptions, her usual design is even more stylized and inhuman, with a flat face, no visible nose, a square-shaped mouth, and no blinking at all.

When she laughs, it can resemble the broken, mechanical laugh of a robot.

Guu is highly intelligent and deeply sarcastic.

She often acts like a detached observer while casually making everyone around her, especially Haré, miserable.

She is the story's signature troublemaker.

Many incidents begin with her actions, whether she intends it or not.

She particularly enjoys tormenting Haré.

Mocking him, cornering him, and pushing him into bizarre situations are among her favorite activities.

Her behavior can feel almost machine-like.

If someone gets in her way, she may simply swallow them without hesitation.

She also has a cruel streak.

For example, she finds Waji's loud laughter annoying and can respond with blunt violence.

Even so, she occasionally makes startlingly perceptive remarks.

Those moments give her an eerie sense of depth beneath the deadpan exterior.

Guu's ordinary form is childlike, compact, and unsettlingly blank.

Her default hair color is pink, or pale pink-blond depending on the depiction.

Her expression is usually blank, and her face often appears simplified in a robotic or doll-like way.

This adds to the strong impression that she is not an ordinary human being.

When she plays the role of a sweet girl, her appearance softens.

When she shifts into her adult form, her eyes may appear red, and her whole body becomes more overtly human and elegant.

Her adult form is a composed, beautiful woman with long pink hair and a cool demeanor.

This transformation makes her look far more organic than her default chibi-like form.

She can also freely alter her body size.

At maximum, she can grow to an enormous scale, said to reach around 100 meters.

Guu possesses a huge range of impossible abilities that might as well be called magic or psychic powers.

She behaves in ways no human could, and much of her existence defies explanation.

Oddly, almost nobody except Haré seems to recognize how strange she is.

Even when other characters witness supernatural events caused by her, they usually do not conclude that Guu is responsible.

This selective blindness is one of her most bizarre traits.

It makes Haré the only person consistently aware of the absurdity surrounding her.

In the anime, her inhuman qualities are emphasized even more strongly.

Some material even leaves open the possibility that she may be some kind of robot, though this is never confirmed.

Swallowing and Internal Space

Guu can swallow virtually anything.

People, animals, objects, seawater, and even famous buildings are all fair game.

Those swallowed are not necessarily destroyed.

They can sometimes come back out again.

Inside her body is a vast fourth-dimensional world.

It functions less like a stomach and more like an enormous alternate dimension populated by swallowed humans and bizarre creatures.

The internal world changes depending on outside influences surrounding Guu.

It can become a game-like field, a ruined wasteland, a period-drama setting, and many other environments.

Within Guu's body, language barriers disappear.

Even people who do not share a language can understand one another's intentions.

Haré, Seiichi Tachibana, Tomoyo Mamo, and Hiroko Yamada spent so long inside that this ability later continues outside her body as well.

That detail makes her interior space one of the strangest recurring settings in the series.

She also seems able to separate general storage from the deeper internal world.

She can pull selected objects from her mouth, suggesting different internal mechanisms for containment.

Her body does not behave like a normal living digestive system.

Objects expelled from inside are clean, with no digestive fluids on them.

If she judges something to taste bad, she may automatically spit it out.

She shows signs of malfunction rather than normal biological nausea.

A blow to the head appears to be one of her weak points.

If struck there by something like a ball or stone, she may forcibly disgorge what she has swallowed.

Magic and Reality-Altering Powers

Guu uses a strange implement called the Chinchikurin Staff, an item whose appearance changes every time it appears.

It can take the form of a bat, a brush pen, a toothpick, or even a bald muscular man.

By saying the incantation "Kokon Tozai," she can activate all kinds of magical effects.

Some of these are small gags, while others reshape reality on a massive scale.

Her powers include body swapping between Haré and Clive, astral projection, time travel, making Marie into an adult temporarily, turning Ale into a human form for a while, and even switching the sex of the entire world.

These feats suggest that her abilities can alter not just individuals, but the world's underlying rules.

Combat Ability

Guu is an outstanding shooter.

Her skill with guns surpasses even Robert's.

In the original work, this is simply shown as exceptional marksmanship with a normal firearm.

In the anime, however, her right arm can open and produce a Gatling-gun-like weapon.

Body Manipulation

She can alter her face, body size, and age appearance at will.

She can also produce water from her mouth.

Her left arm can regenerate quickly if severed, apparently by simply eating it again.

She does not seem to feel pain in the normal way.

Her eyes can display images of her internal world.

She can apparently switch the view shown there freely.

She is highly resistant to water and can function normally while submerged.

Despite appearances, she is light enough that an adult man can easily lift her.

Some depictions strongly imply that Guu is partly mechanical, or at least not biologically normal.

This is especially true in the anime.

Her right arm can transform into a hammer as well as a rotary gun.

The ammunition appears to be generated internally and expelled through her mouth.

Her head can function like a cockpit large enough for a human to ride in.

She can even transform into a giant robot under her own control.

In that robot form, a holographic Guu serves as a navigation system inside the cockpit.

Her head can separate from the body, and the machine is bizarrely operated with a home game console controller.

The anime shows her pulling a game console directly from deep inside her throat.

That scene reinforces the idea that her head may have always functioned as some kind of built-in control chamber.

She even appears to have a self-destruct mechanism.

Why she possesses any of these features is never explained.

Despite seeming soft and rubbery from the outside, she does have vulnerable points.

The overall effect is that of something halfway between organism, machine, and cosmic joke.

General Nature

Guu's mouth can open wide enough to engulf people whole.

It resembles a cartoonishly oversized basin and acts as the entrance to a nearly limitless interior.

The inside contains not only humans and strange lifeforms, but also major world landmarks such as pyramids and the Eiffel Tower.

This raises the obvious question of what exactly she had been doing before the story began.

She does not seem to swallow things out of hunger.

Although she is occasionally shown drinking, she is not generally depicted eating ordinary food.

A resident of her inner world notes that if one intends to live there, it is better not to think too much.

That advice feels very appropriate.

Known Residents

Seiichi Tachibana is one of the people who had been living inside Guu since before the story began.

He claims to be a third-year student at the prestigious Kamikita High School and says he served on the school's disciplinary committee.

His appearance, however, includes brown hair and ear piercings, which makes that claim feel a little suspicious.

Still, he is one of the longest-established residents.

Tomoyo Mamo is a woman whose previous occupation was homemaking.

She is absent-minded, optimistic, and unafraid, and she also hints at having had a rough period in her past.

Like Seiichi, she had already been living inside Guu before the main story started.

She adapts to the impossible with surprising ease.

Hiroko Yamada is a 22-year-old office worker from Kyushu.

She is hot-tempered and tends to drag everyone around her into her emotional storms.

She had an affair with her boss, was heartbroken, attempted suicide by drowning, failed to die, drifted at sea, and was then accidentally swallowed by Guu while Guu was catching fish.

After becoming one of the residents, she gradually calms down.

Adult Guu as an Inner Resident

There is also a version known as Adult Guu, though this is not truly Guu herself.

She is an image created within the dream world of the village elder Boer.

Boer retreats into an idealized mental world and refuses to wake, and this Adult Guu exists there as a traumatic image he produced.

After being swallowed by the real Guu within that mental world, she becomes a resident of the internal realm.

Because she was never a physically real being to begin with, she cannot exist outside Guu's body the way the other residents can.

That makes her a special case even among the already bizarre inner inhabitants.

Guu lives in Haré's household after being discovered by Weda in the jungle.

Because she appears to be Haré's age and has no family, she is accepted as a boarder and schoolmate.

Her relationship with Haré is central to the story.

He is the one person who consistently recognizes her inhuman absurdity, which makes him both witness and victim.

She also affects nearly everyone around her through chaos, manipulation, or unexplained miracles.

Yet most people remain oddly unable to grasp the true extent of what she is.

In chapter 80 of Haré+Guu, Guu suddenly disappears.

At the same time, everyone except Haré loses all memory of her.

The power of the Chinchikurin Staff also vanishes.

The people who had been living inside her body are later found in a state of amnesia.

Several years later, Haré and Marie have a child.

That child has a face strikingly similar to Guu's.

Guu is voiced by Naoko Watanabe in her usual form.

Her adult form is voiced by Sanae Kobayashi.

In the anime, Guu once wore a costume parodying a magical-girl series airing at the same time.

Because of the color scheme, she wore the outfit of that show's protagonist.

Supplementary anime material states that whether Guu is actually a robot remains unknown.

That uncertainty fits her perfectly.