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Basilisk
The basilisk lizard seen volume 1 of Petshop of Horrors is a Central American lizard, and is known for its unique ability to be able to run on water. Of course the basilisk is also the name of a mythic beast, and
Matsuri Akino plays on the double image in her character. The basilisk had the tail of a great snake, but the head of a cock or human depending. It was also known as the cockatrice.
One variety had the ability to turn humans to stone if they looked into the creature's eyes, and the way to kill it was to force it to look at itself in the mirror. Not the theme of a stony gaze
and death by mirror also shows up in the snake-themed myth of Medusa (a woman turned to a gorgon on displeasing one of the gods).
See also Snake in the Bestiary, but the femme fatale of the snake woman comes into play with the female basilisk in PofH. The species found in the petshop is one with an upper body of a
woman but lower body of a snake, and the actor will come to call her Medusa. Her kind was once kept as a weapon for murder, used to entice an enemy by their beauty before removing
their mask whereby the unfortunate would look into her eyes and die. The actor in this tale is a collector or reptiles and so decides to keep her all the same, and finds himself in love with her.
After he commits suicide, Medusa in her grief picks up the mirror of a compact and looks into her reflection, dying beside him.
An end note states that Medusa's costume was based on the art of Erte. He was a designer and painter of the art deco style, who lived from 1892-1990.
A last note on this chapter is the mirror imagery. At the end, the actor decides to take his life because he can only sadness before him (he still sees himself as the prince of the productions he
starred in long ago, but now he stands to lose his home, his pets, and most of all Medusa who embodies what he loves. So he takes off her mask and gazes into her eyes where he sees a reflection of
his ideal of himself that he feels he can't live up to anymore. Medusa on her first sight without her mask, sees the man she has grown to love dead before her. She too can see only the "despair," the title of the
chapter story, and looks into the tiny mirror where her true self is reflected and she decides to die, both in grief of her lover and perhaps at the life before her and realizing her nature fully.