Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki

Its success provided the roadmap for countless imitators and homages, including “Pokémon” and the current anime superstar “Yo-Kai Watch.”Īlso unlike Disney, Mizuki was never content to confine himself to family fare. “Kitaro,” which mixes both traditional yokai and those of Mizuki’s own invention, stitched together a nation’s worth of folktales into a charming world, populated with a menagerie of strange creatures lurking at the periphery of our own mundane existences. Mizuki’s work near singlehandedly resurrected these folk creatures from the dusty annals of history and academia and recontextualized them as pop culture for the masses. Then the spread of modern education and a campaign to eradicate “foolish popular beliefs” stamped them out of the public consciousness. Tales of these shape-shifting creatures and animals inhabiting rivers, mountains, forests, and seas, handed down from generation to generation in the oral tradition, were part of the fabric of Japanese life until the late nineteenth century. Understanding Mizuki requires understanding the yokai. But the yokai were a constant presence in Mizuki’s life, and in Japanese culture as a whole. That a man who had seen such terrible things would embrace such quaint superstitions might seem an understandable escape from reality.

This is often mistranslated as “ghosts” in English, but the yokai are actually spirits of the natural world, more like the fairies of England or the kachina of the Pueblo than the souls of departed humans. (“Ge,” an expression of shock in Japanese, also happens to be part of Mizuki’s childhood nickname, Ge-Ge.) The series focusses on the adventures of creatures from folklore known as yokai. In Japan, Mizuki is an icon for his long-running comic and animation series “GeGeGe no Kitaro,” which debuted on television in 1968 and continues in various forms to this day. It was the coup de grâce for an altogether miserable experience that Mizuki chronicled again and again in his works.

The shredded limb was amputated by the facility’s sole medic, an optometrist by training, without anesthetic.

He should have perished in 1943, when, incapacitated by malaria in a field hospital on the Pacific island of Rabaul, his left arm was mangled in an Allied bombing run. “In our military, soldiers and socks were consumables a soldier ranked no higher than a cat,” the Japanese manga artist Shigeru Mizuki recalled in the afterword to his haunting illustrated Second World War memoir, “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths.” “But when it came to death, it seems we were human beings after all.”īy all rights, Mizuki (born Mura) should not have died on November 30th at the age of ninety-three, from complications of a fall.

Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths by Shigeru Mizuki