Mizuki Shigeru: Kappa no Sanpei

One of the other books I started during our trip to Japan was Mizuki Shigeru's Kappa no Sanpei 河童の三平. Mizuki's enjoying a boom right now - his wife's memoir has been turned into a TV series - and so most of his stuff seems to be in print for the moment. I picked up a bunch, including this.

I got the Chikuma Bunko version, published in 1988. I have Chikuma's versions of several of his other things, including Akuma-kun, and this, like their edition of that, isn't too careful about telling you when and where the stories were originally published. I think what it is is that these editions date from the years when classic manga were just beginning to be taken seriously - that they were being reprinted in adult-aimed formats was already something of a landmark. Serious bibliographic diligence would have been too much to ask.

But I think what I got here was the version of the story that was published in 1968 and maybe 1969 in Shûkan Shônen Sunday 週刊少年サンデー. That makes it a rewrite of the version he wrote for the kashihon manga. The Chikuma version says it's complete (at least that's what I think that there zen means...), but in fact it leaves out a couple of episodes. Still, it was all I could find....

This is the third of Mizuki's great characters, with Akuma-kun and Kitarô: characters and stories he came back to again and again throughout his career, in every medium he worked in. The story involves a human kid named Kawahara Sanpei who, everybody thinks, looks suspiciously like a kappa. In fact, we soon learn that one of his ancestors was a kappa. Anyway, he ends up meeting a real kappa boy, and they switch places. Sanpei goes to live in kappaland, and the kappa kid, Kanpei, goes to live in Sanpei's home. The joke is that nobody in Sanpei's house or school notices.

The book contains two major story arcs, one a sort of comedy of errors in which Kanpei's skill at swimming gets Sanpei, who can't swim, entered in a national swim meet, and it's only magic farts that save him; the other is an extended quest story in which Sanpei and Kanpei have to track down magic items hidden by a long-ago king of the kappas. But even these two stories are less episodic than they sound - they're united by a long story arc concerning Sanpei's mother, who left him when he was a baby, and by a recurring entanglement with a Death God who's trying to trick Sanpei into coming to Hell with him.

So, like Akuma-kun, this is a character with a story, at least in general terms: in both cases each time Mizuki revisited the character he retold this story, with minor or major adjustments. This doesn't seem to have been the case with Kitarô, by the way; his story seems mostly to be discrete episodes, many of which were retold, to be sure; Kitarô is a character and a milieu more than he is a story. (Except for my favorite Mizuki comic of all, the very trippy Kitarô yawa 鬼太郎夜話: this is one long story.)

I think his treatment of kappa was much more interesting in Kappa sen'ichiya. Here they're much more kid-friendly, and much more just like funny monsters. But that's the book's only real weakness.

Sanpei himself is pretty uncharismatic, but of course, that's part of the point. He's a classic Mizuki sad-sack protagonist, a loser at everything he tries, and plagued by bad luck that actually crosses over into tragedy. My favorite parts of this, in fact, were places where Mizuki made Sanpei suffer the kinds of things kiddy manga don't usually touch on - he's got abandonment issues, poverty issues, and death issues. Jeez, at the end we actually have to watch him die, then watch his ghost wander around trying to convince himself he's not really dead.

And the doubling effect with Kanpei is really interesting - why can't people tell them apart? Why is Kanpei in some respects a better human than Sanpei? And then the whole fart motif is just plain awesome. And then, every time you think it's falling into a pleasant morass of crude humor, we get the Death God, who is himself pretty crude and humorous - but then again, he's Death, and he never lets you forget it.

In short, it's more of Mizuki's patented mix of childlike humor and dark, dark adult metaphysical realism.

Mizuki Shigeru: Rabauru senki (1994)

One from the vault:

Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる. Mizuki Shigeru no Rabauru senki 水木しげるのラバウル戦記 (Mizuki Shigeru's account of the war in Rabaul). 1994. Chikuma Bunko ちくま文庫, 1997.

Kind of a memoir, the truth behind the fictionalized version of his war experiences that he published as Sôin gyokusai seyo! Illustrated, and the illustrations have their own history. The Senki itself is in three parts. The first two parts were drawn right after he got back from the war, and in shape they look like they might have been intended for the kami shibai format. They go chronologically from his arrival on Rabaul, but they don’t go up to the end of the war. As he explains it, he had to stop drawing them and concentrate on making a living. He continues the chronology with some illustrations he’d drawn for a children’s book much later, long after he had established himself. This section takes the story through his wounding up to the end of the war, and the end of the Senki proper. This is followed by a section of sketches he made on the island of Toma, where he was transferred to await demobilization.

The main attraction here is the art. The memoir itself, which sort of sways between trying to explicate each picture as it comes up (they don’t exactly speak for themselves - they’re illustrations, not comics panels) and simply narrating his war experiences, is not as interesting as I’d expected it to be. Partly it's because he’s just not that captivating a prose writer - there’s a certain artless charm to his prose, but it wears thin quickly, and there’s no sense of pacing - and partly it's because the illustrations themselves are of moments, almost idylls most of the time, which makes the verbal memoir kind of static, too.

The art, however, is great. The first two parts of the Senki are in a style very different from what he’d settle on for his comics. Kind of rough - almost impressionistic (I lack the vocabulary to discuss art, I find). Quite evocative. Mostly pencil, some in color. The third part is his mature comics style, but with a level of detail and texture his comics usually dispense with - these are meant to be appreciated slowly, rather than zipped through to get on with the story. The Toma sketches are really, really good - carefully executed sketches made with the limited resources (scrounged paper, hoarded crayon nubs, etc) he had at the time.

Both the narrative and the sketches spend a lot more time than the comic did on his relationship with the natives. He spent a lot of time getting to know the various villagers he was encamped near, and came to really long for their kind of life. This seems to have gone beyond the familiar romanticizing of the simple life of the savage, although that certainly enters into it: he seems to have seriously considered demobbing in Rabaul and just staying there. The villagers offered to set him up with fields, and he says he came this close to accepting.

Anyway, the book is worth it for the art. The writing is good as background info on the art.

Mizuki Shigeru: Nezumi otoko no bôken

Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる. Nezumi otoko no bôken ねずみ男の冒険. Chikuma Bunko ちくま文庫, 1995.

This consists of a bunch of short stories Mizuki wrote, mostly for Garo ガロ, mostly in the mid-'60s; one comes from 1975. I don't think they were written as a series; in fact, I think the only connection is that they all feature the character of Nezumi Otoko (Ratman). He's best known as a regular foil/sidekick/nemesis of Ge-ge-ge no Kitarô, so this collection's main charm is the chance to see Ratman on his own.

Ratman is an interesting character. Occasionally the stories define him as definitely as the Wikipedia article I just linked to does: a human-monster halfbreed. But I wouldn't trust that definition any farther than I could throw it. Usually he's much vaguer. He seems to have some powers, great longevity, and superhuman stench if nothing else; he's also neither dependably good nor evil. He's dependably undependable, but we'll get to that. I think he's best placed in the lineage of the sennin 仙人, the immortal wizard sage of East Asian mythology: marginally or originally human who's made himself unhuman by virtue of long study, not to mention derangement of the senses and body. Usually these figures are associated with superhuman virtue, and so they're sometimes called "Daoist saints" in English, but they're also features of Japanese (at least) supernatural stories, usually have an air of danger about them, and can sometimes be trickster figures.

Ratman (who sometimes makes his home in the scraps of woods behind shrines, significantly enough; sometimes he even poses as a god) is certainly a trickster. His role in the Kitarô series is usually to stir things up: he's nominally Kitarô's friend, but he'll sell Kitarô out for anything. His main goal is always to make a buck - he's poor as a churchmouse (pun intended, but not by Mizuki, I'm sure) - he's always scheming to con someone out of something, always dreaming of getting rich. He'll help Kitarô when it's convenient to him, but the minute something shiny comes along, he's off.

Plus, did I mention his personal odiousness? He hasn't bathed (we're told) for three hundred years, and wears a robe of some sort that hasn't been washed in just about as long. His farts and his breath can knock you out, and when he's rendered robeless (which sometimes happens) his skin is covered with - well, I don't think I want to know.

So why is he my favorite Mizuki character?

Part of the answer is the side of him that's on display in these stories, where he's on his own, left to work his scams on unsuspecting salarymen, samurai, schoolkids, and ninja acolytes. He's indefatigable, for one thing. Which is not to say tireless: he's a lazy SOB just like me, but he has great energy in pursuing his dreams of getting ahead. He never succeeds, but he never stops trying. So there's that.

There's also the eloquence and verve with which he sells his schemes: he's got the gift of gab, and he uses it indiscriminately. He backs it up with an indomitable arrogance that never fails to bring a smile.

All of this is on a character level; but there's also the fact that Ratman's sleaziness gives Mizuki an opportunity to tell stories that play to his deep cynicism about society. In fact Ratman is a secondary character in most of these stories, merely facilitating the sufferings of the protagonists. One story focuses on a monstrous plant that blooms on Yume no shima and threatens to take over Tokyo; Ratman appears in the guise of a city bureaucrat who explains that the purpose of municipal government is not to protect its citizens, but to hire as many people as possible to do meaningless jobs. Elsewhere Ratman appears as a sort of agent provocateur, a kimono merchant (calling himself Cardin, from France) who visits a village and destabilizes it from within, pitting one faction against another, making a profit at every turn. Elsewhere he runs a business that "takes away your worries" - a businessman sends his lazy son to Ratman, who implants a monster-egg in the son, which allows the monster Industriousness to take over the son. The only problem is, the businessman runs a drug company, and the newly-brilliant son starts inventing cures for illnesses - which threatens to put the company out of business, since they depend on illness for their financial wellbeing.

In short, a Ratman story is going to feature broad, wicked social satire combined with gross-out humor and Mizuki's queasy-cute art. What's not to love?

That art. I say "queasy-cute," but the cuteness is usually only in the fact that you can tell the figures are supposed to be humorous. Broadly speaking we're in the realm of the cartoon. But he almost always goes for prickly over cuddly, lumpy instead of symmetrical, ugly instead of beautiful. Take the three yakuza in this last illustration (fighting with a monster Ratman has sicced on them). They look like Mizuki sketched them in about a minute and a half, and yet each is drawn with unerring lines. You get a great sense of physicality and personality from each of them, a sense of yakuza meanness; and yet they're not particularly scary, just kind of pathetic. Pathetic: that's humanity, for the most part, in Mizuki Shigeru.

But those monsters....

Mizuki Shigeru: Akuma-kun

Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる. Akuma-kun 悪魔くん (Devil Boy). 1991.

To be precise, this is a 1991 bunkobon reprint. It contains six stories that were originally published in 1966 and 1967 in Shônen Magazine 少年マガジン.

Akuma-kun is one of Mizuki's more durable heroes, right up there with Kitarô, which means he's appeared in just as bewildering a variety of iterations. (Here's the Japanese Wikipedia article on him.) In 1963-4 Mizuki wrote kashihon manga about Akuma-kun, then in 1966-7 he rebooted the series (to use the current lingo) in Shônen Magazine. That's what we have in the book I'm talking about here. Then in 1970, in Shônen Jump, he did a rewrite of the kashihon Akuma-kun, which was probably already getting hard to find. In 1987-8 he wrote a sequel to this in Comic BE! コミックBE! Then in 1988-90 he rebooted it again for Comic BonBon コミックボンボン. Meanwhile in 1993 and 1994 he revived the 1966-7 incarnations of Akuma-kun for a couple of newly written books.

In short, there are three versions of the character running around out there, and chronologically they all overlap. Confusing, but tantalizing. Eventually I'll read 'em all. But at the moment the only Akuma-kun I've read is this book.

In this incarnation, essentially Akuma-kun (real name Yamada Shingô) is that one boy in every ten thousand years who can master the ancient rituals for demon-summoning and control. But he can't do it alone: in the first story Dr. Faust shows up to teach him the finer points. Thereafter Akuma-kun can summon the devil Mephisto and make him do his bidding. But Akuma-kun has only the best of intentions. He wants to harness the demons' supernatural power to do good, bring world peace, etc.

As you can see right off the bat, it's a very loose take-off on the Faust myth. I'm eager to read other incarnations to see if Mizuki ever goes much farther in exploring that myth, because to tell the truth, that doesn't seem to be the point here.

Rather, I think Mizuki used this milieu as essentially an opportunity to explore Western monsters, ghosties, ghoulies, and demons. Mizuki is, as is well known, Japan's foremost artist of traditional Japanese monsters: he's made a cottage industry out of researching and imagining creepies out of Japanese folklore, of which the kappa is only the most pedestrian example. That's what his most famous series, Kitarô, is all about.

With Akuma-kun he gives himself license to explore monstrosities out of the Western traditions. Dantean demons, Boschean horrors. Witches, dapper European devils, haunted castles, etc. It is, if you will, an exercise in Occidentalism (a tendency in Japan every bit as pronounced as America's Orientalism); this extends to the kabbalah trappings Mizuki throws into Akuma-kun's demonology.

Which is not to say that Mizuki is undertaking a taxonomy of Western horrors. A lot of the most impressive spooks here seem to have sprung straight from his id. We're talking primordial, Chthulhu-like weirdness here. And at the same time, he can't entirely suppress his love for oozy Japanese monsters, and so he throws in a couple of them; and let's not forget the cameo by Enma (the judge of the dead; in Japan usually imagined as Chinese).

The stories themselves are mediocre, mostly devolving into the supernatural equivalent of kaijû battels. But the art: wow. Nightmarish and comic all at the same time, and the detail. Look at that full-page rendering of the head-monster: check out the skull mandala at the top left, floating on a swirl of bones. And then note Akuma-kun at the bottom left: "Yow!" He's right.

Mizuki Shigeru: Sôin gyokusai seyo!

Speaking of Mizuki Shigeru, here's one from the vault:

Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる. Sôin gyokusai seyo! 総員玉砕せよ！ (Die Gloriously - That's an Order!) Originally published 1973. Kôdansha Bunko 講談社文庫, 1995.

This is a manga about the author’s experiences as a soldier on the island of New Britain during the war. Mizuki has always been obsessed, evidently, with his war experiences, and has done a lot for the peace movement and to keep the memory of the war alive; he’s written a bunch of short manga stories about it, but this seems to be the only, or at least the first, full-length manga “novel” he did about it.

It’s only semi-autobiographical: here, everyone in the unit dies, whereas in real life Mizuki himself survived. Names are changed, too, though not places, and the minor incidents seem very sharply observed. He’s clearly writing about life in the army from an insider’s perspective.

The main character and Mizuki surrogate is named Maruyama, but he drifts in and out of the narrative; it’s less his story than that of his unit, which is completely destroyed over the course of the book. At first it’s the dangers of the jungle—illness, animals—then it’s enemy attack, as the Americans close in on the island, and then it’s the stupidity of the unit’s leaders, as its commander has this romantic notion of sending them all to a glorious death rather than letting them retreat to the hills to fight a guerilla action. This is the idea of gyokusai, to die like a jewel being crushed, and it was common rhetoric during the war. It’s Maruyama’s misfortune that his commander bought into it: he orders them all into a suicide charge. Some survive, though, and wander north to where the main body of the army is. This is an embarrassment to the higher-ups, though, who feel that to survive a suicide charge is to bring shame on the army. So they pressure the survivors into either offing themselves right then and there or girding up for another suicide charge. Maruyama takes the latter option, but before this charge can get going an American attack blows the whole encampment to smithereens. The end.

Yes, it’s very dark. But it’s leavened with some humor—very dark humor, of course—and more than that with a cynicism toward war and bushido that refuses to make heroes out of anybody. They’re all victims of a stupid war, fought stupidly.

The story is told in an almost haphazard fashion. It’s really hard to tell the characters apart and keep them straight, and even figure out the organization of the various units involved—but I think that’s kind of the point, the idea that all these guys are more or less interchangeable. Certainly the army thinks they’re totally expendable.

One of the recurring motifs is the physical abuse of grunts by officers—the habitual slapping of rookies, making them wash their superiors' loincloths, cook their superiors' meals, etc. Not only are the conditions awful—soldiers are always hungry and half sick—but the treatment is dehumanizing. Thus much of the story is told in the form of little incidents that serve to illustrate the life of the soldiers, rather than a constantly-building tension as the end approaches. In fact, the end kind of approaches out of nowhere—each step is a surprise, just as much of a surprise as any enemy bombing raid must have been to these guys.

The art is fantastic. Most of the time it’s cartoony, but he’ll shift into a hyperrealistic style for key scenes—most noticeably at the end, when everybody’s dead and he gives us very real-looking sketches of piles of dead soldiers.

This is an important comic.

Mizuki Shigeru: Kappa sen'ichiya

Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる. Kappa sen’ichiya 河童千一夜 (A kappa thousand and one nights). 1993.

To be precise, this is a 1993 bunkobun reprint. All but one of the stories were originally published in 1969 and 1970 in Action Comics アクションコミックス, then collected in 1970 under the title Kappa kô 河童膏 (Kappa ointment); this was republished under the present title in 1976, then augmented in 1986 with one more story, first published in 1980. The 1993 bunkobon edition I read is a reprint of the 1986 edition. I note all this because the 1993 edition includes none of this information: nothing to tell you that these stories weren’t new in 1993.

In the 1960s, Mizuki had a very popular series about kappa called Kappa no Sanpei 河童の三平 (Sanpei the Kappa); it was contemporary with Kitarô and (caveat: I haven’t read it) was a similar thing, sort of aimed at kids and centering around a cute/creepy monster. These stories are a little later, and they don’t feature Sanpei; they’re all about kappa but the stories themselves aren’t connected, and kappa are depicted slightly differently in each one. Moreover, the stories are a little darker, with more loose ends and rough edges; they seem to bear more or less the same relation to Kappa no Sanpei that Kitarô yawa 鬼太郎夜話 does to the main Kitarô series.

By darker, I mean a couple of things. They’re a little more horror-oriented than his kiddie monster tales. They’re closer in spirit to the stories collected in Kaiki kashihon meisakusen and Kyôfu kashihon meisakusen: bad things happen to characters, and endings are usually downbeat. The first story, “Kyûri jigoku きゅうり地獄” (Cucumber hell), has a kappa getting caught in an endless series of Sisyphean punishments. No exit. Elsewhere we have a fair kappa maiden living in eternal solitude after her fox lover is killed; kappa captured and killed and exhibited by humans; a kappa falling in love with a ghost who eventually rejects him. The style is Mizuki’s patented mix of realistic backgrounds and cartoony characters, but the fates of these humorously drawn ghoulies are as haunted as the legends that inspire them.

They’re also dark in that most of the time the kappa’s fates are sealed by their interactions with humans. There’s broad irony here, in that traditionally kappa are thought of as monsters who, if they don’t always actively prey on humans, certainly make life difficult for us. And Mizuki’s kappa are mischievous, but they always come out the losers in their encounters with people. Take the poor kappa who, overcome with a desire for a human female, hides in the latrine of a samurai’s house to peep at the samurai’s daughter (a wonderfully Tanizakian detail). Okay, this is kind of mean. But to punish him the samurai cuts off the kappa’s hand and holds it hostage, thus enslaving the kappa for years. Hardly just desserts.

In fact, in most of these stories the kappa are a version of Mizuki’s suffering Everyman: average guys victimized by forces beyond their control, plucky but incompetent. Mizuki emphasizes this by depicting several of the kappa protagonists with makeshift glasses held on with string; this is a detail he uses on some of his more hapless human characters, including the soldiers meant as a stand-in for Mizuki himself in his war tales.

Stories like these are why I love Mizuki so much. Greil Marcus writes of Bob Dylan that his treatment of folk songs and folk themes reveals the “old, weird America” that lives therein; Mizuki understands the old, weird Japan. It’s a dark, dank place of creepy-crawlies, squishy-squirmies, and heebie-jeebies.

And, occasionally, uncanny beauty, like this depiction of the kappa’s desire for a human woman. It's a disturbing image, to be sure (it's the title page to one of the stories, and depicts a mood, not a scene; it's far more sexually explicit than anything in any of the stories). Far more disturbing than it may appear at first: I think the swirl surrounding the figures is meant to suggest they're underwater, meaning the woman is either drowned or under the kappa's spell. It's horrific. But it's other things, as well. Beautiful, because of the way Mizuki (a terrific draftsman, among other things) depicts the curves of the woman's body, the arc of her back and hair, the placidity of her face. And comic, because of the imbalance in size and grace between the woman and the kappa, a small ugly monster. The horror, the beauty, and the humor all reinforce each other, making this a potent representation of a folkloric motif. (And more besides: if the kappa is Everyman, then this is a representation of Everyman's desire for Woman. Taken that way, what does it say about male desire? That it proceeds from something small, grotesque, shameful, and is directed at something great and beautiful? This image is perhaps an analog to the little Screamers Munch put in the corner of his Madonnas.)

Mizuki Shigeru and the kashihon manga

(The subtitle of this here blog lists books as first among the Tanuki's interests, but I haven't written about any yet. The one I'm in the middle of is kind of taking a while to finish; when I do, I'll write about it, but in the meantime here's something about the last book I finished. Purely for personal reference--if I don't write it down, I'll forget everything about a plot within a couple of months--I've been writing up books I read for a while now.)

Mizuki Shigeru 水木しげる.　Kaiki kashihon meisakusen 怪奇貸本名作選 (Weird tales from the rental manga) and Kyôfu kashihon meisakusen 恐怖貸本名作選 (Scary stories from the rental manga). Shûeisha 集英社, 2008.

Mizuki Shigeru is my favorite manga author/artist. Born in 1922, he's still around. His most experimental work is probably his wartime memoirs--he served in Rabaul, lost an arm there, and drew some startlingly vivid manga about his experiences--but he'll always be thought of mostly as a horror writer. He specializes in traditional Japanese ghosties and ghoulies--he's more or less solely responsible for the images modern Japanese have of traditional monsters. Poke around here or here and you'll get an idea of what I'm talking about (sites in Japanese).

This is a two-volume collection of early horror stand-alones that Mizuki published in kashihon manga mags in the early 1960s. The kashihon were a phenomenon of the immediate postwar period in Japan: they were manga magazines or books that were published expressly for the rental market. Most kids couldn't afford to buy manga in those days, so they rented them on the cheap; the rental market died out in the '60s as the economy boomed, and most of the kashihon titles were forgotten until recently. Now, as part of the eternal manga boom, some are being rediscovered (the originals are scarce) and republished.

Most of Mizuki's work, even in this period, was in series centered around popular characters: Ge-ge-ge no Kitarô, etc. The stories in these two volumes contain early versions of Nezumi Otoko (from the Kitarô stories), Mizuki's version of the kappa, and some of his other later characters, but they have no actual connection (that I’ve noticed) with his famous later series. They’re just stand-alone creepy stories. Here they’re divided into “kaiki” (weird) and “kyôfu” (scary) but that’s just an arbitrary categorization, I think. No real difference in tone or subject matter between the two volumes.

They vary in quality, but the best of them are quite creepy, with that sense of homely gloom that he does so well—horror paired with poverty, monsters in patched clothing. Against this backdrop the protagonists/victims generally display some ostensibly admirable quality such as ambition, self-respect, or rationality, but Mizuki always shows this to be pathetic. In their own way, these stories are a potent counternarrative to the risshin shussei (work hard and succeed, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, make something of yourself kid) model of modern Japan, as well as the shiny new Tokyo of the ‘60s.

Some deal with traditional monsters or legends; some just with ghosts. One is a really weird sci-fi tale about a kid who agrees to be turned into a cyborg so he can become an astronaut—he loses all his humanity in the process, turns into a green monster, and ends up killing the scientist who made him. Haunting. Others are about people who explore remote corners of Japan and find…horror!

The art varies widely. Some of it is fairly polished, some is almost amateurish, and it all looks kind of rushed. This is the first I’ve read from his kashihon period, so I don’t know if it’s a factor of his age or the industry. The art isn’t as beguiling as Kitarô, but then there’s also a kashihon Kitarô, so I should compare it with that. It works, though.

Special mention should be made of the story “Haka o horu otoko” (The man who dug up graves) It’s about Yukio Mishima stealing skulls from a graveyard so he can give them to Jean Cocteau. A wicked little satire of the great novelist and his Western pretensions.

I’m fantasizing about someday translating a bunch of Mizuki stuff, and if I do, a selection of five or six of these would not be a bad thing to include.