Why you should read the Showa masterwork of manga pioneer Shigeru Mizuki
This piece was first published in World Literature Today.
Manga is a Japanese story form that falls somewhere between a graphic novel and a comic book, featuring extended plotlines and a distinct pictorial style. If the oft-repeated figure is true that less than three percent of foreign works are translated into English, then manga is no exception. Nonetheless there are several publishers such as Viz and Tokyopop that are working hard to quickly translate Japanese works. These include recent manga works such as Konomi Takeshi’s Prince of Tennis and Naoki Urasawa’s phenomenal epic 20th Century Boys, but also manga by pioneers like Osamu Tezuka, an author who was so influential that he has been called the Walt Disney of Japan for fostering an entire pop culture industry.
Yet there were figures beyond Tezuka who were equally popular in Japan who have escaped international recognition. A few such authors have been released by Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly, such as Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a great who founded the macabre and workaday gekiga style of manga.
Recently, Drawn & Quarterly has taken on the almost Sisyphean task of bringing the work of manga pioneer Shigeru Mizuki to English-speaking audiences. Shigeru Mizuki, who is now 92, is best known in Japan for his character Kitaro, a spirit child who maintained the delicate balance between the world of the living and the realm of yokai — ghosts and spirits from animist and Shinto traditions. Ge ge ge no Kitaro became a hit television show during the 1960s and made Shigeru Mizuki a household name. But he has remained largely unknown in the U.S.
Drawn & Quarterly collected several of the most interesting stories in its 2013 volume Kitaro, translated by Jocelyne Allen. A typical chapter involves a normal town that suddenly encounters a series of strange, otherworldly disappearances. Then the unflappable Kitaro arrives to root out the yokai and neutralize it, usually through some clever trick or hidden knowledge about how spirits behave. He is often helped by his father, who lives in his eyeball and pops out to provide advice when necessary. (His father, the eyeball, also likes to take baths in teacups.) Kitaro will sometimes invite his compatriot Nezumi Otoko on his adventures, but Nezumi Otoko is an unreliable friend, a trickster figure who happily betrays Kitaro when it is convenient.
The Kitaro stories are charming and utterly unpredictable. The author places Kitaro in increasingly helpless situations, but the boy always gets out of trouble, and it’s fun to guess how Kitaro will defeat the yokai this time. Kitaro is not judgmental of the spirits, either, accepting them on their own terms, no matter how evil they may seem.
His generosity even extends to the stinky Nezumi Otoko after he has betrayed him yet again. Shigeru Mizuki draws the stories in his signature style of richly detailed backgrounds contrasted against cartoony characters.
To understand how Kitaro came to be, and how Shigeru Mizuki developed as an author, we need to look at the recently released series Showa: a History of Japan. The three majestic volumes (a fourth will be released in September 2015) each number over 400 pages and were originally published in Japan in 1988 in eight editions. The series covers the period of the reign of the Emperor Hirohito from 1926 to 1989 — an era of unprecedented change in Japan, which saw the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the rise of Japan as an economic powerhouse. The volumes feature brilliant introductions by the scholar Frederik L. Schodt, who contextualizes the extremely complex period, and the texts are deftly translated by Zack Davisson. Showa is part memoir and part psychological map of a country creating an empire — with special resonance today.
In the first volume, which covers the years 1926 to 1939, we learn about the impact of the devastating Kanto earthquake, which razed much of Tokyo to the ground and sparked a major financial crisis and economic uncertainty. Shigeru Mizuki dispassionately documents how the response to this uncertainty created the rise of fascism. While left-leaning forces began pushing for a more egalitarian society, right-wing groups systematically assassinated and targeted dissidents, and mixed their nationalism with a potent mix of Nichiren Buddhism. One such fascist, Nissho Inoue, developed a slogan of “One Person, One Kill” to attract military officers and rural men. But not everyone was right-leaning. A young man protested unemployment by climbing up a chimney tower at a major factory and refusing to come down for six days. Meanwhile, the military expanded into China, distracting citizens from the ailing economy with increasing imperialism across Asia in search of its so-called New Order.
The upshot of the first volume is that there were diverse voices competing for leadership in pre-war Japan, and many of them were not militant or nationalist, as American television documentaries might have you believe. The tragedy is that these voices were systematically silenced by imprisonment, torture, or assassination.
Contrasted with the cold facts of the turbulent pre-war period, many of which are already well documented in historical texts, is Shigeru Mizuki’s own experience. He writes engaging chapters about his life growing up in the seaside town of Sakaiminato. A grandmotherly figure named NonNonBa looked after the young boy and taught him about the world of the yokai, which sparked his lifelong interest in the unseen. Along these lines, he utilizes the trickster figure Nezumi Otoko from Kitaro to narrate the more complex events in Showa, such as military maneuvers and the complex politics of imperialism in China. (To a Japanese reader this is sort of like Goofy popping up to narrate a Disney film, so it’s less weird than you might suspect.) Shigeru Mizuki also reveals how the militarism sweeping the country affected children, who worshiped top generals as heroes, and who beat each other senseless in vicious neighborhood gang-wars.
Economic deprivation and hunger coursed through Japan throughout the middle three decades of the 20th century. Farmers, symbolically considered the lifeblood of the country, starved as commodities markets fluctuated wildly. “Desperate people are forced to sell their families,” Shigeru Mizuki writes, “meaning, of course, their daughters.” These girls fell into prostitution and frequently committed suicide — washing up on the beaches of the author’s home town.
Shigeru Mizuki didn’t just witness the Pacific War, as it was known in Japan, he fought as a soldier. In the second volume (1939–1944), He recounts his training and deployment to Papua New Guinea, where he was part of a unit that was ordered to commit a suicide charge. (This experience was also featured in Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, which I reviewed at Words Without Borders in 2011.) His stories of hunting for food and fighting pestilence are more interesting than the battle scenes — which he draws with horrific detail — and he underscores the brutality of Japanese military officers towards their own troops, when corporal punishment was the norm. He reminds us not only of the humanity of most Japanese soldiers but also of their mindset — how many had been inculcated from boyhood about the glories of militarism, such that they had to snap their heels together any time someone mentioned the Emperor. “They called me apathetic,” he comments wryly during one beating, “but I think they were just pissed off that I could take a beating so well.” Yet individual soldiers were often generous, and looked out for one another.
Throughout the stories about military conflict, Shigeru Mizuki presents a detached, objective viewpoint about decisions by Japanese leaders, often with derision. “The Nanking Massacre. The Sook Ching Massacre,” he writes. “There seem to be a lot of massacres in this war.” Speaking about national elections, he says, “When we do vote, there is only one candidate. We’re no different than the Nazis.”
There are rare moments of ambivalence, however. Shigeru Mizuki’s brother was tried as a war criminal for executing a downed pilot during the war and spent several years in prison under U.S. occupation. “The enemy forces were very uptight about killing POWs,” he said in an interview with the Japan Times, “but we didn’t necessarily feel the same.” He is also suspicious of the American occupation, and describes abuses perpetrated by U.S. troops as much as those by Japanese authorities.
Still, it’s remarkable that Shigeru Mizuki can revisit this history with so much objectivity, considering that his arm was amputated after he was hit by a bomb on Papua New Guinea. This occurred when he was already delirious with malaria — and the amputation was botched, such that he had to have multiple surgeries over the course of his life. In the midst of his suffering, he still managed to find joy in jars of pineapple, and to develop a relationship with the indigenous Tolai people of Papua New Guinea: “The feeling was something special, spiritual, like I was born to the people of the forest.” The removal of his arm does not dominate the narrative, which is all the more remarkable because he is, after all, a fine artist who needed his hands.
The third volume of the Showa series (1944–1953) is arguably the most compelling. This is because Shigeru Mizuki documents the end of the war as well as the shattering depression that coursed through post-war Japan, when roves of former soldiers traveled the country begging for food, and when crime was rampant. In one gruesome story, he recounts the uproar caused by Yoshio Kodaira, a man who traveled the country raping and murdering women by luring them in with an offer of food — a predilection the killer said he had picked up as a soldier in China.
The volume concludes with Shigeru Mizuki’s observation that it ironically took another war to lift Japan out of depression — namely the armed conflict in Korea — when hundreds of millions of dollars were pumped into the country to allow it to serve as a staging ground for U.S. troops.
Having personally read plenty of manga that was terribly translated or poorly laid out on the page (manga reads best from right to left), Drawn & Quarterly deserves praise for its masterful production. The translation, too, allows the reader to move breezily along, with footnotes to explain historical details. Translator Zack Davisson explained to me by email that, “As a translator, the best part is being able to share this bizarre, unique genius with the English-speaking world.” He found the vocabulary especially challenging as well as Shigeru Mizuki’s tendency to include arcana in his work. “You won’t know it from looking at the English version,” Davisson added, “but one of the pictures had captions written in old Korean. That took time to work out! Thankfully I have some Korean friends who were able to help, but even they had difficulty reading it.”
But perhaps the most enjoyable part of reading the Showa volumes is uncovering the personality of the author himself. He is at once a naive, curious child; a playground bully; a conniving athlete who rigs his own races; a clumsy, distracted boy with no ambition; a comedian; a lazy good-for-nothing; a glutton with an enormous appetite; a raconteur; a beggar; a philosopher; an anthropologist; a fine artist; and a scholar.
Each chapter reveals the vibrant humanity of the author, who may have been all of these things at different times during his exceptional life. He was in this sense like the trickster Nezumi Otoko — he blended and adapted to the times in order to survive, and when times were good, to enjoy himself.
The Showa series confirms that Shigeru Mizuki is a priceless chronicler of the major events that rocked Japan during the 20th century. Today the country is asking important questions about its Constitution, which was created under U.S. occupation, and its military future in the world. These works serve as a dire warning against the dangers of imperialism, of the consequences of choosing to fight rather than to think.
Deji Bryce Olukotun is the author of Nigerians in Space, a novel out now from Unnamed Press. www.returnofthedeji.com and @dejiridoo.
