Manga Review: Kitaro’s Strange Adventures by Shigeru Mizuki
This is the fourth paperback volume of Kitaro manga from Drawn and Quarterly. The history segment this time starts in 1960 when Shigeru Mizuki was fired from drawing Graveyard Kitaro and the book was assigned to a different creator! He went to another publishing company that liked his work, and started bringing out Kitaro’s Night Stories, with a very similar cast. Neither company had the money to pursue a copyright suit (and since Mizuki had based Kitaro on an earlier character, his legal status was tenuous.)
As a dig against his competition, Mizuki created a villain for the new storyline, Nise-Kitaro (“Fake Kitaro”), a boy who strongly resembles the real Kitaro and wants to use his lookalike status to gain fame and money, even if it means disposing of the original. He’s been recycled a few time in later stories, but none of those appear in this volume.
“Yokai Cloth” starts the volume off with a Chinese yokai who initially pretends to be friendly. He tricks Japanese yokai into ingesting a drug that turns them into cloth, then sells the cloth to Japanese humans. Any human that wears the cloth falls under the Chinese yokai’s mental control. This is all part of a plan to bring Japan under the domination of Chinese yokai. The first yokai to catch on is Satori, a monkey-like fellow who can read minds to evade hunters.
To battle this menace, the Japanese yokai call upon Ido-Sennin, (“Well Hermit”), a Chinese sage who came to Japan a millennium ago, and learned how to become a yokai so that he can subsist on methane gas. The invasion turns out to be another deception. The only actual invader is Qi, the nine-tailed fox, who has created his minions using magical drawings. That doesn’t mean he’s a pushover once you know that, though!
“The Demon Bael” starts with Nezumi-Otoko meeting a ramen shop waiter who has an evil hand. Turns out he got that hand from a mysterious dude after he lost his original in an accident. The mysterious dude turns out to be Bael, one of the Seven Princes of Hell! (It’s never explained why he’s running a petty evil hand scam.) Once Kitaro confronts Bael, the demon unleashes the Fifteenth Army of Hell. There’s only one way to fight this overwhelming foe, but will the cure be worse than the disease?
“Iyami” is a yokai that looks like an old man wearing a woman’s kimono. Two kids lost in the woods find the hibernating Iyami, and mistaking it for a human in need, get Iyami to a hospital to be revived. Once awakened, Iyami turns out to be an eromodoki, a spirit of ice and cold. It feeds on humans’ capacity to feel happiness, leaving them numb and irritable. It can also make other beings fall in love, though it’s a shallow obsession rather than joy.
Iyami’s true form is not humanoid, but does have testicles, which Kitaro hits with machine gun teeth(!) Now powerless, Iyami is returned to hibernation, and happiness returns to Japan. However, Nezumi-Otoko did bad things while mind-controlled and is hunted by the law.
“Miage Nyudo” is the cover story. A bully poops on the sacred mountain forbidden to humans. The “looking-up monk” kidnaps the boy to teach him some harsh lessons. Kitaro goes to rescue the young hooligan, but Miage Nyudo’s abilities to control wind and grow to immense size make him a dangerous opponent. This story features arbitrary skepticism by the adults, who believe none of what the children tell them about the adventure.
“The Demon Belial” came to Japan at the beginning of the Meiji period, disguised as a Portuguese merchant. He planned to use his powers to gain control of the island nation. But before he could carry out his plans, the karasu tengu (crow goblin) discovered what was up, and secretly stole Belial’s demonic power, sealing it in a rock.
Reduced to the human charlatan he appeared to be, Belial has been wandering Japan ever since performing parlor tricks for pennies. But now Nezumi-Otoko has accidentally broken the sealing rock, and Belial is back, baby!
The first thing Belial does is seal away his old tengu enemy, but there’s enough of a crack for the yokai to send a warning to Kitaro. Now our hero must battle Belial’s body part orbs (some body horror here.)
“Yokai Cloth” is the most interesting of the stories, and features other yokai getting a chance to shine while Kitaro is indisposed. “The Demon Bael” has the most striking ending, with Kitaro and Medama Oyaji indefinitely trapped inside a monster (which suggests that it was at the end of one of the manga’s runs.)
Recommended to fill out the set.
