Learning from Monsters: Mizuki Shigeru's Yōkai and War Manga1
CJ (Shige) Suzuki
The "insectile feeling" is a feeling in which one is never hung up with human issues, just like one of many other earthly creatures"
--- Mizuki Shigeru, Nonnonbā and Me [memoir] (Mizuki 1999, 238)
Abstract: This paper first attempts to identify and explore the thematic and formalistic continuity of his manga by illustrating his lived life and career as a cartoonist. Mizuki has an experience of drawing paintings and comics in various mediums in the course of the
development of postwar Japanese comics, which stylistically distinguishes him from other postwar story manga creators. By situating his life in wartime and post-war periods of Japanese history, I will bring his aesthetics, philosophy, and nuanced critique of society to the surface. Featuring anti-heroic and grotesque human and non-human characters as main protagonists, Mizuki's manga demonstrates a critique of wartime imperialism and postwar Japanese society, both of which seemed to him to be suppressive and dehumanizing. As a whole, I argue that the preferred use of premodern cultural traditions and unique aesthetic components epitomize not merely a nostalgic longing for a disappearing Japanese tradition in the progress of rapid
modernization, but also his utopian cosmology, which critically addresses the alienated condition of modern human life.
Keywords: Mizuki Shigeru / manga / yōkai manga / war manga
I. Introduction
In the history of postwar Japanese manga, Mizuki Shigeru stands out as one of the leading cartoonists, a comparable giant to Tezuka Osamu who is hyperbolically mythologized as the "god of manga." Even after the death of the younger Tezuka in 1989, Mizuki is still active and his manga keeps attracting new readers within Japan and perhaps beyond its national borders, particularly after his semi-autobiographical manga NonNonBā won the "2007 Best
1 The order of Japanese names in this essay follows the Japanese convention that family names precede given names. Also, I used and consulted the Japanese language texts of Mizuki's works; therefore, all the quotes are my translations.
Album" at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France.2 In contemporary Japan
where comics are enjoyed as part of popular culture (rather than subculture), Mizuki has become something of a media celebrity due to his longstanding status as a prolific manga artist as well as being a person who has lived through the social and political changes of 20th century Japan. In addition to recurrent adaptations of his manga in TV anime and films, several TV programs about his life have been produced.3 Both Mizuki and Tezuka are the two most celebrated manga
artists in Japan, but they are quite contrastive in terms of style, formalism, and aesthetics. As for stylistic inspiration, Tezuka’s manga is more influenced by Western popular culture and media --- namely, the Western films and cartoons of Max Fleischer and Walt Disney (Schodt 63, 1986; MacWilliams 117, 2000). On the other hand, Mizuki's aesthetics seem to be rooted more in traditional Japanese visual culture, largely due to the fact that Mizuki often draws on premodern folktales and legends and visual traditions, such as Edo period Buddhist emaki picture scrolls and
ukiyo-e woodblock paintings, in creating his manga. Due to this, his manga frequently evoke a
nostalgic image of Japan or Japaneseness. Yet, it should be noted that Mizuki himself is a modern man who experienced rapid modernization and modern warfare. Indeed, although less known, Mizuki produced various genres of manga, including science fiction, war chronicle manga [senki-mono], detective stories, sports, history, and autobiography throughout his long career.
In this paper, I would like first to identify and explore the thematic and formalistic continuity of his manga by illustrating his life and career as a cartoonist. Mizuki has an experience of drawing paintings and comics in various mediums in the course of the development of postwar Japanese comics, which stylistically distinguishes him from other postwar story manga creators. By situating his life in wartime and post-war periods of Japanese history, the paper attempts to bring his aesthetics, philosophy, and nuanced critique of society to the surface. Featuring anti-heroic and grotesque human and non-human characters as main protagonists, Mizuki's manga demonstrates a critique of wartime imperialism and postwar Japanese society, both of which seemed to him suppressive and dehumanizing. As a whole, I 2 The English translation of Mizuki's war manga Sōin gyokusai seyo! will be published as Onwards towards Our Noble Deaths! in May, 2011 from Drawn & Quarterly.
3 In 2010, one of the most popular TV drama serials features Mizuki's life again. It was based on a book written by his wife Mura Nunoe's autobiographical book, Gegege no nyōbo [The Wife of Gegege], published from Jitsugō no nihonsha in 2008. The success of this TV drama also led to a production of the cinematic version of it.
argue that the preferred use of premodern cultural traditions and unique aesthetic components epitomize not merely a nostalgic longing for a disappearing Japanese tradition in the progress of rapid modernization, but also his utopian cosmology, which critically addresses the alienated condition of modern human life.
II. Mizuki's Life and His Auteur Signature in Yōkai Manga
Mizuki's life parallels with the historical trajectory of the modern Japanese nation as well as with the development of the modern form of Japanese manga. Born in Osaka in 1922, and raised in Sakaiminato in Tottori Prefecture, Mizuki spent his childhood in a pastoral environment of this region located in the southwestern part of Japan. As Japan faced the impending total war, he was drafted by the Japanese imperial army at age 21 in 1943, and sent off to Rabaul, a port village in the South Pacific. Mizuki barely survived the war, but lost his arm by a bombing of the Allied Forces during his stationing there. Returning to Japan, which was suffering from
nationwide poverty at that time, he did many different jobs to make ends meet until he started drawing pictures for kamishibai [paper theater], a form of storytelling entertainment with illustrated slides for children. In the late 1940s when Japan was experiencing material shortage, kamishibai was one of the most popular entertainments for children. Soon after, he began to draw manga for kashihon rental bookstores, which were somewhat similar to today's rental
video/DVD shops, where a customer could borrow or read books on the spot for a small fee. As the kashihon industry declined with the advent of television as well as the rise of Tokyo-based publishers with nationwide circulation, Mizuki was then recruited by editor Nagai Katsuichi who founded a Japanese alternative magazine Garo in 1964. Unlike other commercial manga
magazines, this alternative manga magazine allowed creative freedom for manga artists to experiment with the comics medium, or explore serious socio-political themes. Similar to underground comix in the U.S., Garo was enjoyed and embraced by college students who were politicized by the global trend of counterculture. Mizuki's belated commercial success came around the time when Japan was in the middle of a rapid economic growth. In 1965, Mizuki made his way to a mainstream manga magazine, Shōnen Magazine, with his work Terebi-kun [TV-kun], which won him the prestigious Kōdansha Children Manga Award. Since then, along with the recurrent anime and cinematic adaptations of his works, the popularity of his manga continues today.
As a prolific manga creator, Mizuki has produced a wide variety of genre comics, but in contemporary Japan, Mizuki is best known for his yōkai manga. Three of his representative works, Gegege no Kitarō, Kappa no Sanpei, and Akuma-kun, all feature Japanese yōkai monsters as main characters. In general, yōkai refers to preternatural creatures and monsters that appear in folkloric stories and legends existing all over Japan. Although some critics trace the origin of yōkai to Japanese mythological writings, the status of yōkai arose with the rise of publication culture of the mid-Edo period. Famously, 18th century ukiyo-e artist Toriyama Sekien collected folkloric stories and painted yōkai creatures in his The Illustrated Demon's Night Parade [Gazu
hyakki yakō]. What Sekien did was the visualization of yōkai, which until then existed only as an
oral form in rural folk legends. Through mass production technology of that time, Sekien successfully popularized yōkai among his urban audiences. In a similar way, ukiyo-e master Katsushika Hokusai and later Utagawa Kuniyoshi also painted several yōkai drawings in woodblock prints. These Edo publications were products of the so-called "early modern" period in Japanese history, a period of mass production and rapid population growth in urban areas. The rise of yōkai visual representation in the mid-Edo period was, therefore, a product of the
interaction between urbanity and locality, with the emergence of mass production and the
development of a circulation network among urban residents. In the Meiji period, although some intellectuals (such as philosopher Inoue Enryō and folklorist Yanagida Kunio) approached yōkai imagination and culture in ethnographic and theoretical ways, yōkai imagination had been relegated to the premodern, superstitious, and irrational domain. As the relentless progression of modernization with enlightenment, rationalism continued and prevailed in every domain of daily life, yōkai became obsolete and almost disappeared. And yet, in some rural areas of Japan, including the place where Mizuki was raised, yōkai narratives remained and survived among the people. In this context, it could be argued that Mizuki is a modern artist who reactivated the traditional yōkai imagination by visualizing them in modern, newer technological popular media such as manga and anime.
Following the tradition of Edo ukiyo-e masters, Mizuki’s visualization of yōkai creatures are often monstrous, rendering them with grotesque bodies and otherworldliness. Regarding the imagination of monsters, cultural theorist Donna Haraway states that "monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations" (Haraway 1991, 180). In the West, a monster is a boundary figure, demarcating the line between the human and the monstrous, the explainable and the mysterious, and nature and culture. Unlike this Western division between the
human and the monstrous, Mizuki's yōkai monsters often appear next to humans and even some share the same space within the same community of humans. For instance, one episode entitled "Daruma" from Gegege no Kitarō, narrates a story in which yōkai monsters haunt an apartment and live just as other humans do. In another manga Hakaba Kitarō, a medical doctor --- a symbol of modern scientific rationalism --- is unwittingly led to the world of the dead while driving a car in his neighborhood. Unlike Miyazaki Hayao's fantasy anime Spirited Away, depicting a
distinctive transition from this world to the otherworld by means of a symbolical tunnel or a water creek, Mizuki's manga world has no clear boundary between the worlds. Human characters unknowingly wander into another realm from their familiar world. The spatio-temporal
continuity between this world and the otherworld in Mizuki's manga suggests his magical realist sensibility, like Gabriel García Márquez and Alejo Carpentier, which blurs the demarcation between the mundane and the fantastic. As Mizuki himself later became a self-appointed researcher and expert of folktales and mythological legends around the world, he became interested in the multiple, layered view of the world in which the mysterious exist side by side with everyday life. Moreover, Mizuki's figurations of yōkai are not always characterized by their dangerous and threatening traits. Although carrying an ominous nature, several yōkai monsters he presented also take on amicable and humorous attributes, which invite the readers to develop affective relationships with Mizuki's yōkai monsters, not limited to one based on merely horror or fear. Indeed, regardless of their bizarreness or grotesqueness, Mizuki's yōkai are widely cherished and beloved by contemporary Japanese, as is evident by abundant character merchandise of his yōkai as well as the more than 100 bronze statues of his yōkai characters standing on the "Mizuki Shigeru' Road" in his hometown, which attracts tourists from all over Japan.
Mizuki's fascination with yōkai monsters came in part from his childhood experience. In his episodic memoir Non'nonbā and Me [Nonnonbā to ore], Mizuki writes of his childhood, during which he learned of many yōkai monsters from an elderly housekeeper nicknamed "Nonnonbā" ["Granny Nonnon"]. According to the memoir, she was one of the people who maintained the shrines or temples --- called "nonnon-san" in the dialect of his hometown --- but started working for the Mizuki's possibly due to financial difficulties (Mizuki 1999, 16). While visiting Mizuki's household, she told many stories of traditional festivals, customs, folkloric stories, including superstitions about yōkai to the young Mizuki. The memoir introduces an episode in which Mizuki first learned of a yōkai called "akaname" ["grime-licker"]. Mizuki
narrates a childhood episode in which Nonnonbā told Mizuki that this yōkai appears when one is lazy and leaves the bathtub unclean. Scared by the story, Mizuki helped her wash the bathtub all day long (Mizuki 1999, 62). On another occasion, when Mizuki's younger brother went alone to the bathroom located some distance from the living room, he became so scared that he became sensitive to all the small sounds. When his fear had reached its climax, he rushed back from the bathroom, believing he heard a sound of something frightening. In response to his fear,
Non'nonbā explained that it was caused by "yōkai buruburu" [yōkai shudder] which often haunts people who become very timid and frightened. Upon hearing this explanation, young Mizuki responded, "It makes perfect sense" (Mizuki 1999, 68). Looking back at his childhood, Mizuki notes that “[i]t was as if I was living with yōkai every day" (Mizuki 1999, 65).
Mizuki's account of his familiarity with yōkai stories is perhaps faithful to his own experience, but we should be also careful to take what Mizuki writes in his memoirs at face value. Like Tezuka, Mizuki often creates his public persona through writing about his childhood in memoirs and autobiographical manga. For instance, Mizuki repeatedly identifies his birthplace with pastoral backcountry Sakaiminato in memoirs and interviews, but he was, in fact, born in Osaka and his birth certificate is from there.4 In his semi-autobiographical manga masterpiece Non'nonbā and Me [Nonnonbā to ore] --- the same title of his memoir ---, Mizuki stresses the
intimate relationship with Nonnonbā who inspired young Mizuki with her mysterious yōkai narratives, but his interaction with her was probably to a lesser extent.5 Mizuki later revealed that
he learned stories about yōkai more from Yanagida Kunio's book on yōkai culture. In this regard, folklore studies scholar Michael Dylan Foster is right in saying that that Mizuki "has created a persona intimately linked with the nostalgic image of yōkai and Japan's rural past" (Foster 2009, 165). Foster argues that Mizuki's manga offer a strong yearning for the idyllic, nativistic past of Japan without being torn down by either the modernization or modern warfare: Mizuki's works offer "strains of nostalgic longing for a purer, more authentic world . . . and the yōkai he describes and produces are implicated in the formation of Japan's identity as a nation" (Foster 2008, 9). This might explain one of the reasons for the acclaimed status of Mizuki's manga in France; that is, Mizuki's manga evoke a profound impression of the "authentic" image of 4 In his memoir Nonnonbā to ore, Mizuki writes that "I was born and raised in Sakaiminato, Tottori of San'in Region" (Mizuki 1999, 12).
5 Adachi Nobuyuki, an autobiographer of Mizuki, remarks about Mizuki's indifference about Nonnonbā 's death (Adachi 1994, 306).
traditional Japan or Japaneseness, which would satisfy the Western, Japanophile expectation. While some Western critics attempt to perceive a continuous line from premodern visual
tradition to modern manga, recent manga criticism within Japan has become more careful about making a sweeping, trans-historical statement which claim the linear continuity of manga tradition from the Edo period or 12th century picture roll of Toba Jōkō's Scrolls of Frolicking
Animals [Chōjū jinbutsu giga] (Miyamoto 2002; Berndt 2008). What Mizuki demonstrates in his
manga is, in fact, a performative process of constructing a continuity of cultural tradition by aligning his works with premodern visual culture.
And yet, the strong evocation of the Japaneseness in Mizuki's manga ---- perhaps more so among Western audience --- is also underscored by Mizuki's distinctive manga style and formal qualities. In his seminal book about the comics medium Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud points out the predominant use of what he calls "aspect-to-aspect" panel transitions in Japanese comics. To illustrate his point, McCloud quotes a page from Mizuki's manga by saying "aspect-to-aspect transitions have been an integral part of Japanese mainstream comics almost from the very beginning" (McCloud 1994, 79). The effect of this transition, according to McCloud, is not in the focus on sequentiality, or procession of narrative, but in the establishment of a mood or an ambience of the scene. McCloud states that the aspect-to-aspect transition has an effect in which "time seems to stand still in these quiet, contemplative combinations" (McCloud 1994, 79). Mizuki makes best use of this type of panel transition by creating a mise-en-scène, accentuating the importance of an "atmosphere" or "feeling" of the setting without unfurling actions of
characters. Whereas Tezuka's manga style is often associated with the abundant use of "cinematic techniques" that create the dynamism of movement and action, Mizuki's formalism is more devoted to elaborating the milieus or the background of scenes, giving a static and motionless impression. This aesthetic tendency derives in part from his formal studies in paintings at art schools as well as from his experience in the kamishibai industry. Manga critic Yonezawa Yoshihiro points out that, whereas the hegemonic style of the postwar Japanese manga was formed under the strong influence of Tezuka, several manga artists such as Shirato Sanpei (The
Legend of Kamui), Kojima Gōseki (Lone Wolf and Cub), Ibara Miki, and Mizuki Shigeru --- all
of whom came from the industries of kamishibai, e-monogatari [a textual narrative with
separately-located illustrations], or illustration --- have an independent, unique style (Yonezawa 2008, 233). Compared to postwar story manga, kamishibai has a loose structure of sequentiality in terms of both narrativity and visuality, which allows a kamishibai narrator to weave ad lib
narration based on the limited number of pictures. The nature of kamishibai medium gives kamishibai painters, including Mizuki, an opportunity to focus more on visual elaboration itself without being restrained by the demand of narrative construction. When illustrating the
prevalence of aspect-to-aspect transition in Japanese comics, McCloud lays Mizuki's manga frames and Tezuka's ones side-by-side, but this is somewhat of an ahistorical overgeneralization. Several Japanese manga critics rather emphasize the distinctive difference between their formal characteristics. For example, Natusme Fusanosuke analyzes the formalism of the two manga giants and identifies the stark contrast of stylistic bipolarity, stating that Tezuka's drawing lines are aimed to demarcate each object to clearly indicate its referent, but Mizuki's lines are feeble and sometimes fragmented as his characters' contours are not necessarily well-circumscribed (Natsume 1995, 223-224). In postwar Japanese comics tradition, Tezuka's style has become hegemonic with its "cute" [kawaii] doe-eyed, round-body characters, but Mizuki's aesthetic has been relatively independent from it. Indeed, Mizuki's representative works display a mixture of faintly-drawn, flattened-out depiction of human characters in contrast to emphatically detailed portrayal of natural environment behind them. This unique style was crystallized around the early 60s and became Mizuki's . (Fig. 1)
III. Mizuki's Semi-Autobiographical War Manga
Unlike Nakazawa Keiji (the cartoonist of atomic bomb manga Barefoot Gen) and Nosaka Akiyuki (the author of Graves of the Fireflies), the older Mizuki was a soldier who experienced bloody war on the battlefields. Whereas the former two witnessed the Japanese people's
imperial army in which he experienced an extreme dehumanization. This makes Mizuki's war manga unique and distinguished from others. Oftentimes, Japanese war representations in popular media are criticized with their emphasis on the one-sided narrative of victimhood, but, Mizuki's war manga resists and offers different narratives about the war, and, as scholar Matthew Penny explains, they have "not slipped into a comfortable 'victim's view' of the war (Perry 2008). Indeed, a short war manga, "Kūnyan" ["Young Girl"], narrates about the brutality of Japanese soldiers to local Chinese citizens. Another work, "Kandere", recounts a story about a humane interaction between the Japanese soldiers and the natives on an island in the South Pacific. Mizuki had heard about these stories from other soldiers and created his war manga pieces.
His book-length semi-autobiographical war manga Onwards towards Our Noble Deaths! [Sōin gyokusai seyo!], published in 1973, demonstrates his anti-war message. This manga, according to Mizuki, "based on 90% fact" (Mizuki 1995, 355), debunks the imperial project by exposing the irrationality or absurdity of the war itself. Unlike a typical war manga genre that often depicts heroic fighting scenes on a battlefield, the majority of the manga recounts the daily menial activities and hard labor on the island. While sent to fight the war, soldiers are dying not in battle but by accidents performing menial labor and diseases in the jungles. The Japanese original title has the term "gyokusai" which was used for indicating a "honorable suicide attack" during the wartime, but Mizuki's manga never portrays heroism or romantic martyrdom in such an act. Researching Mizuki's war chronicle manga, Japan Studies scholar Roman Rosenbaum states that Mizuki's war manga "emulate, subvert and satirize these traditions" (Rosenbaum 2008, 356). This statement is most appropriately applied to Onwards towards Our Noble Deaths since, contrary to its title; Mizuki focuses on the follies and miseries of soldiers in the war, dying without any "honor." In this regard, Mizuki's war manga is quite contrastive to Kobayashi Yoshinori's re-celebration of masculine heroism of the Japanese soldiers in his problematic manga On War [Sensō-ron].6 Unlike Kobayashi who was born after the war, Mizuki repeatedly narrates about his war experience in different forms such as manga,
autobiographies, and memoirs. In one of his memoirs about the war entitled War Chronicle
of a Father: Talking to the Daughter of Mizuki Shigeru [Musume ni kataru otō-san no senki],
Mizuki describes an incident that completely changed his attitude toward the war. After barely 6 In fact, Mizuki created his own short "essay manga" entitled "On War" ["Sensō-ron"] as a response to Kobayashi's manga, in which Mizuki writes that Kobayashi's manga reminds him of the wartime heroism and makes him feel as if he was again on a transport ship for a war (Mizuki 2007. "On War, " 12).
surviving a harsh battle which wiped out all other soldiers, Mizuki, who was the only who escaped, managed to reach another troop after several days of roaming on the island. Finally, upon his return, a lieutenant in another troop asked him "why did you leave your post? Your fellow soldiers all died. You should’ve died, too. Next time you die first." (Mizuki 1985, 113). Mizuki writes that "since then, I could no longer understand the lieutenant and the military; at the same time, I could not help but feel a fierce anger boiling from within" (Mizuki's emphasis; Mizuki 1985, 114). This incident is repeated in different manga and memoirs, which suggests that it was a significant turning point for Mizuki to realize both the irrationality of the imperial war machinery and the ultimate dehumanization of the war itself.
In Onwards towards Our Noble Deaths, Mizuki extensively employs his signature style to narrate his war experience. This manga is characteristic of two contrastive styles: the feebly-drawn, simplified style for human characters and the excessively elaborate drawings for nature.
Throughout this work, Mizuki persistently juxtaposes the detailed beauty and exuberant vitality of animals and plants with the human soldiers depicted as if they were dwarfs in front of
grandeur nature (Fig. 2). The combination of both styles seems to underscore the debased human existence in the imperial war machinery vis-à-vis the lively animals and plants in nature. At the end of this manga, however, a bespectacled private solider named Maruyama --- possibly an alter ego of Mizuki --- is rendered in a close-up with an emphasis on his grotesquely
disfigured body, unlike the earlier portrays of him. (Fig. 3) At this point in the narrative, he is Fig. 2
slowly dying due to the injury he received from a harsh battle and aimlessly wandering around the island. His body is covered in blood, and his cheek has a gunshot hole. This disfigured, monstrous body makes him a sort of yōkai, evident by the fact that he makes a yōkai-like shrieking scream: "kekeke" (Mizuki 1995, 349). The intensified grotesqueness of this dying soldier’s body speaks to Mizuki's concerns and fascination with the non-human creatures and grotesque monsters. Like this case, Mizuki's manga foregrounds non-humans such as yōkai, monsters, animals, and nature while humans do not occupy the central focal point.
Mizuki's interests in the non-human and the grotesque can be traced back to his 1959 work, Kitarō from the Grave [Hakaba Kitarō], published as a kashihon format. Kitarō from the
Grave share a similar world with one of his most popular manga series Gegege no Kitarō, which
has been repeatedly adapted to TV anime serials from the 1960s to the present. In the TV serials, the protagonist, Kitarō, is a superhero who fights the evil yōkai monsters with the help of good yōkai creatures. However, the original Kitarō character in
Kitarō from the Grave presents the protagonist as a spooky,
ominous figure who brings bad luck to hapless people around him. It is well-documented in manga historian Hirabayashi Shigeo's Mizuki Shigeru and The History of Transformation of
Kitarō that Mizuki first drew the original form of Kitarō story
based on a kamishibai tale of the same title created by writer Itō Masami (Hirabayashi 2007, 15). Based on a folktale, Itō created a story in which a destitute mother is bullied to death, but her
baby is resurrected from the graveyard and carries out vengeance for his dead mother with his mysterious power. Fascinated by this revenge story by a weaker character, Mizuki created his first Kitarō story for a kashihon manga book entitled Yōkiden. While Mizuki has created several versions of Kitarō manga, his best story appeared as "The Birth of Kitarō" in Garo in 1966. The episode narrates the birth of the infant protagonist from a grave, with an emphasis the ugliness and grotesqueness of Kitarō's body. (Fig. 4)
This is diametrically opposite from the TV anime version of "cute" Kitarō. Born from a
graveyard, Kitarō has disheveled hair and a missing eye, described in the narration: "[h]is ugly face is different from that of humans" (Mizuki 2006, 108). Hakabano Kitarō reveals that Kitarō
is the last survivor of a vanishing tribe called "yūrei-tribe" ["yūrei-zoku"], which had once thrived but had been driven into a deep forest, and then into the underground by the humans who arrived later on and proliferated on Earth. The fate of yūrei-zoku suggests Mizuki's implied critique of the hubris of humanity, believing that they are the only dominant species on Earth. Adopted as a child by a human couple, Kitarō has neither friends nor any others who understood him, and eventually, he began to be ill-treated by his adoptive human parents, brought on by his "abnormal behaviors" to the adults, such as visiting the graveyard every night. At the end of one episode, Kitarō and his disembodied "eye-ball" father left the house and initiated their journeys, leaving the following message: "It is suffocating to live in the human world." (Mizuki 2006, 269). It is not difficult to consider that Mizuki's concern attends to the weaker or the socially marginalized.
Mizuki's preferred depiction of the socially vulnerable in part derives from his war experience where he had experienced the ultimate dehumanization as a newly recruited private soldier. Yet, it is arguably more from his postwar experience after his return to his own nation. Unlike critics who tend to discuss Mizuki's manga in relation to his wartime experience, manga critic Gondō Shin points out the importance of Mizuki's postwar experience in which Mizuki had struggles with material adversity with his disabled body and joined the disabled war veteran group.7 As a member of the disabled veteran group, Mizuki's participated in a couple of veteran
demonstrations for compensation as a disabled soldier [shōi gunjin] immediately after the war. Referring to this fact, Gondō remarked that, "[a]lthough many intellectuals [of those days] have talked about the wartime experiences, they uniformly avoided discussion of the war’s disabled veterans. . . There were quite a few people who hoped that the wounded veterans would
disappear soon, because the disabled veterans were visible evidence of the war and the ones who failed to die" (Gondō 1969, 84). What Gondō suggests here is another repression imposed on war veterans in the postwar "democratic" Japan. Before and during the war, disabled soldiers
received hospitable treatment with financial compensations and public recognition as having "honorable wounds," but such benefits were terminated by the GHQ policy during the
Occupation period. In addition, the war veterans became extremely relegated from mainstream Japan as the nation attempted to leave its negative past behind and rush for an economic success. In the hurried process of recovery to become a newborn nation, the disabled veterans were 7 Adachi Nobuyuki, biographer of Mizuki, notes that Mizuki was invited to a disabled war veteran group called "Shinseikai" and joined in demonstrations for soliciting monetary contributions (Adachi 1994, 191).
ideologically silenced and even physically displaced from the public space.8 Mizuki most likely
shared such alienation from mainstream Japan. Considering what he went through in postwar Japanese society, Mizuki's manga show his compassion to those who are marginalized in society and some of them are returned as embodied figures of yōkai monsters, disfigured freaks, or non-human creatures.
Although Mizuki’s shows preference for portraying the socially alienated, his manga vision never succumbs to misanthropy or pessimism. Instead, his manga brims with a celebration of life, the one of any "trivial" creatures, including the mysterious, the monstrous, the
non-humans, and the "worthless" bugs. In Onwards towards Our Noble Deaths, Mizuki revealed his own philosophy about life through a voice of a medical officer in the troop. He opposed a lieutenant who had ordered the troop to commit an honorable suicide charge without surrendering to the enemy. The doctor counter-argues,
It is the will of the universe for all living creatures, even a small bug, to live. It is evil to prevent such a will by a human-caused act. The armed forces is the most pathological entity for humanity . . . there is nothing more healthier than the vault of heaven, chirping birds, and the islanders. (Mizuki 1995, 272)
For Mizuki, war is evil not because it kills humans but because it creates a condition in which humans and non-human creatures can never fully embrace their lives. Although Mizuki's works seem to be obsessed with death, ghostliness, and otherworldliness, Mizuki's manga, in due course, endorses the affirmation of life, which is, in his cosmology, an ultimate good. Regarding the relationship of humans and non-humans in manga, cultural critic Yomota Inuhiko acutely identifies Mizuki's de-anthropocentric philosophy, contrasting it with Tezuka's "humanist" assertion. Yomota argues that in Tezuka's manga, the nonhumans often become a target of exclusion by the humans, but in Mizuki's works, "the nonhuman others are never the objects of exclusion. Instead, it is the human protagonist who gradually sheds his human outline, eventually mutating into a nonhuman in a blissful metamorphosis" (Yomota, 2008 108). Mizuki's manga style, offers a critique of the human centrality in modern period and suggests the reconsideration of the relationship between the human and the nonhuman others.
8 Historian Igarashi Yoshikuni documents that war veterans were removed from the street of Tokyo in the preparation for the Tokyo Olympics.
IV. What Monsters Tell Us
In the introduction of his Monster Theory, Jeffrey Cohen argues that "the monster is born only at [the] metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment --- of a time, a feeling, and a place" (Cohen 1997, 4). If such is the case, Mizuki's yōkai monsters were invoked in a cultural and historical juncture of Japan, in which human existences were again diminished and refashioned during the rapid industrial capitalization of the so-called “high-growth” period. As the etymology of monster --- "monstrum" in Latin, meaning "to advise," "to warn," and "to remind" --- suggests, Mizuki's yōkai monsters remind us of the negative side of the modern human society within a specific national and historical context of Japan, which promotes
industrialism and progression, while creating the alienation of human life. Given this perspective on Mizuki's aesthetics and philosophy, his revitalization of traditional Japanese oral and visual cultures is not so much a longing for establishing the authenticity of Japan(eseness) than a critical reflection of the society formed in the postwar period. Mizuki's yōkai, freaks, and
disfigured non-human creatures are the visual manifestations of the weaker or the excluded from mainstream society, which critically addresses the social and political repressive structure of postwar Japan. In this regard, Mizuki’s manga are ethical because Mizuki's figuration of yōkai monsters warn us about such a repressive structure of the society from margin and imagines a possible better world, one of yōkai monsters that celebrate any lives of "trivial existences" through Mizuki's unique manga style.
CJ (Shige) Suzuki is Assistant Professor of Modern Languages and Comparative Literature at City University of New York at Baruch. He earned his Ph.D. in Literature from University of California at Santa Cruz. His main publications are "Manga/Comics Studies from the Perspective of Science Fiction research: Genre, Transmedia, and Transnationalism" and "Tatsumi Yoshihiro and the Gekiga Movement in the Global Sixties." He teaches Japanese literature, film, and popular culture.
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