Jason Thompson's House of 1000 Manga - Shigeru Mizuki
by Jason Thompson,
Episode CVI: Shigeru Mizuki
"Outside of the world we know, there exist a hundred thousand other very strange worlds." If Osamu Tezuka is the God of Manga, Shigeru Mizuki is the kami. Of course, they're the same words in Japanese—Tezuka's the manga no kamisama—but when I think of Tezuka I think of a wise old man on a cloud, endlessly drawing manga, and when I think of Mizuki I think of a a mythological Japanese creature, a playful spirit, a master of monsters. Shigeru Mizuki is perhaps the world's oldest active mangaka, 90 years old and still going strong, although most of his works have never been released in America. Sakaiminato, Mizuki's hometown, is graced with hundreds of bronze statues of the monsters he drew, a Mizuki museum, and even a statue of the still-living Mizuki himself. It's not hard to imagine people in the future burning incense beneath it, like a Buddhist shrine to a deified mangaka, the artist whose works defined the modern meaning of yokai. Mizuki's life is like a legend in itself; It got worse. Mizuki got malaria. Then, his left arm was blown off in an Allied bombing raid. After undergoing surgery in the jungle without anesthesia, Mizuki gradually recovered, an experience which left him with a belief that some spirit force was protecting him and guiding his life. After the war he almost decided to stay in Papau New Guinea with the natives, with whom he had become friends, but instead he returned to Japan. The one-armed veteran worked a variety of jobs, including running an apartment building, operating a pedicab, and drawing artwork for kamishibai "picture-plays." In 1958, when it was obvious that kamishibai weren't able to compete with television and manga for kids' attention anymore, Mizuki adjusted to the times and drew his first professional manga, Rocketman. He soon became a prolific mangaka. He drew some horror: in 1963 he even did an unauthorized manga adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror, changing the setting of the story to Japan. But he also drew straight-up silly shonen manga, albeit with a working-class, leftist bent: his first big hit was TV-kun (1965), a comedy about a boy who (in Fred Schodt's words) "discovers how to enter his TV set, steal the products displayed on commercials and give them to his poorer, real-world friends." But Mizuki's first BIG big hit came when he mixed the two: shonen manga and horror. In 1959 he began drawing Hakaba Kitarō ("Weekly Shōnen Magazine.
—Shigeru Mizuki, 
GeGeGe no Kitarō is the story of Kitaro, a creepy one-eyed boy with strange powers who hangs out in the graveyard and other ghoulish places. In addition to being monsters with weird, vaguely defined powers, Kitaro and his friends have one other thing in common which is unusual by modern manga standards: they're all outcasts on the margin of society. After all, humans don't believe in monsters (a recurring theme in Kitaro is dumb adults who only don't believe in the supernatural). And Kitaro doesn't really have any human kid friends to make things more 'accessible' for the reader, and he doesn't spend much time enrolled in human school as a mysterious transfer student, or anything like that. The theme song of the original GeGeGe no Kitarō anime, which started in 1968, goes like this… In the morning we're half asleep in bed …accompanied by about a thousand "ge ge ge ge"s. Monsters don't go to human school! (Or ninja school, or magic school, for that matter.) Monsters aren't a part of your System, mannnnn! Kitaro is a kid, but he's also a weird wandering rebel freak, with just his dad to keep an eye on him. (I'm sorry. That was awful.) When not fighting monsters, he sometimes fights against corrupt adults, like in the story "The Leviathang," in which an evil scientist tries to capture a prehistoric whale-creature and ends up injecting Kitaro with prehistoric blood which turns him into a giant hairy monster. It's typical Kitaro chaos, with a happy ending. That particular story was influenced by the Is it any wonder it became a hit? Mizuki's art style (cute monsters, funny faces) are an influence on the work of artists as different as Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan And at some level, it seems, Mizuki actually believes this stuff exists. Mizuki went on to draw many other, non-Kitaro manga about diverse topics—a manga history of the Showa Era, a biographical manga about NonNonBâ tells the story of Mizuki's childhood and his friendship with old lady Barefoot Gen, but much subtler. Then a new girl moves into town, Chigusa, an invalid whose time is mostly spent with bedrest and doctors. Mizuki makes friends with her, even though she's from the big city and doesn't believe in small-town superstitions. Death isn't too uncommon in this poor rural area, and Mizuki starts to think about the spiritual side of yokai. If yokai are real, might heaven not be real as well? In this manga, it seems like yokai are real, although you can never be quite sure it's not a dream or a hallucination. Mizuki makes friends with a yokai, the big-haired azuki-hakari, and he asks it deep questions. "A moment is an eternity, an eternity a moment," azuki-hakari cryptically answers. As Mizuki grows up, he deals with love, sorrow and the ostracism of his classmates, and Nonnonba and the yokai give him advice. It's all about spirits, Nonnonba says; the emotions he feels are actually the spirits of people in his heart. "As time goes on, you'll gather bigger and heavier spirits in your heart. But your heart will grow to bear that weight, and that's how you become an adult." Spirits, monsters, yokai, religion, fiction, fact, everything mixes together in Mizuki's fascinating manga. It drives me crazy how little of his stuff is available in English; out of the approximately 1 jillion volumes of GeGeGe no Kitarō, only three short film and a drama series. Life is basically good, even if sometimes sad things happen. People are basically good, even if sometimes they're foolish and blinded by power. Monsters are real. Even if this means the Dunwich Horror is real too, I could totally get behind living in the world of Shigeru Mizuki's manga.
So much fun at monster school
Never a test, never a quiz
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