Mikael H.
Google
The Meguro Parasitological Museum is small, but it feels wrong in the way a quiet room can feel wrong, like something is listening from the walls. It doesn’t loom. It doesn’t threaten. It waits.
Inside, the lights are low and the jars line up like confessions. Glass cylinders filled with clear fluid, each one holding something that once lived inside someone who thought they were alone in their own body. Worms long as nightmares. Things thin as threads and clever as burglars. Creatures that found a warm place and decided to stay. You look at them and feel an itch that isn’t there. Or maybe it is.
This is not a place of jump scares. This is slower. The horror creeps in sideways. The labels are neat. Clinical. Dates, organs, Latin names. The calm tone makes it worse, because it tells you this is normal. This has happened before. It will happen again. The human body, it turns out, is just another old house with bad locks.
Some exhibits are frankly disgusting. You lean back without meaning to. Your stomach tightens. You imagine these things moving, feeding, growing in the dark, unnoticed, until someone finally realizes that the pain has a shape. Lovecraft would have understood this place. Not the monsters from beyond the stars, but the truth that the real invasion doesn’t come from the outside. It comes from within.
And yet, there’s a strange pull to it. You keep looking. You can’t help yourself. The collection is small, but dense, packed with quiet atrocities. It gets under your skin. Literally, if you let it.
At the end, there is a museum shop. Bright. Cheerful. Almost obscene in its normality. It sells parasite-themed souvenirs—shirts, keychains, little jokes you can hold in your hand. They are lovely, in a sick way. You buy something if you’re brave, or foolish, or if you want to prove that you faced what was in the jars and didn’t run.
When you step back outside, the street feels safer than it should. Your body feels like borrowed property. You walk away knowing one simple, unsettling fact: you were never really alone in there.
