Shigeru Mizuki

So when...

N- not, not, not picking any horror manga or anything, but, um, the first time I actually sat down and read a full manga was actually at my relative's house, and it was, uh, Shigeru Mizuki's GeGeGe no Kitaro.

Um, not choosing, not because it was horror or anything, but just manga in general

generalあと、あの、ホラー漫画ということで言えば、あのー、ま、これはあの、本屋で立ち読みなんですけども、あの楳図かずおさんの漫画はよく本屋で、あの、立ち読みはしてました。買って-- あの、お金ないので買ってはいないですけど。

Horror manga that I went out and actually read because it's a horror.

Um, I actually was poor, didn't have any money, so I just went to a bookshop and just stood there and read, um, many of the, uh, Kazuo Umezu manga.

With Shigeru Mizuki, uh, was he somebody that not just you, but a lot of people knew your age at that time because he was the father of the Yokai? Is that something I try to think of it in terms of somebody I've known since I was a kid that was important, like, um, you know, Walt Disney, for example, or somebody like that.

But Mizuki feels like, um, an important figure in Japanese history, not just manga history.

Yeah, so Foster mentions, like you said, Rob, that illustrations of this creature can be found in texts from the Edo period.

But according to Foster, this yokai really experienced a renaissance in the later 20th century, probably due to the work of the folklore scholar and manga artist Mizuki Shigeru, who was responsible for consolidating a lot of disparate yokai folklore and, like...

Taking kind of different but similar stories that were going around in the oral traditions of Japan or in little isolated texts here and there, kind of consolidating them into these big creature types and making these creatures much more popular and well-known.

And according to Mizuki, this yokai is a, quote, spirit of flesh, which is funny because that almost seems like an oxymoron spirit of flesh.

called Yamashirocho.

And the place, the area sort of first recognized that it had a lot of interesting yokai stories when Mizuki Shigeru, who's a very famous Japanese mangaka and anime artist who really kind of revived yokai as part of popular culture in the post-war years.

Mizuki Shigeru identified and created a yokai called Konakijiji, the old man that cries.

And he identified it from some old documents.

And then he created an image of that.