Yokai

by Shigeru Mizuki (Artist)

Yokai
By Blaise Cornélius , February 16, 2017

On February 16th, Cornelius will publish 'Yokai', by Master Mangaka Shigeru Mizuki. This book highlights the fantasy universe developed by Mizuki throughout his life, presenting 200 illustrations in black and white and color (32 pages colored by the author), presenting for the first time these illustrations in their entirety and in large format. Scanned from the original art for an unprecedented level of high-quality, high-fidelity reproduction, the majority of these images are totally new. The unique characteristics of Mizuki's art and the different drawing techniques he uses are thus highlighted by the size of the illustrations. On each page, you will discover a new monster whose specificity and location are revealed to you at the end of the book. In addition, a postface will give you more information about these supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore. An essential book for all fans of prodigious illustrations, amazing stories and Japanese mythology!

The yokai are those supernatural beings who inhabit the shadows, the forgotten places or the sheds behind abandoned & delapidated houses. These ghosts, benevolent or hostile, appear on rare occasions; they might be clinging to someone's back with long, skeletal digits, bringing them luck, or scaring them by throwing red beans on the ground... because some people find that scary, I guess. Few people see the yokai, & even fewer know them. Shigeru Mizuki is often credited with rescuing the yokai from oblivion when Japan, eager to win its place among the post-war nations, turned its back on its legends. The weird & wonderful yokai that appear in his beloved manga classic 'Kitaro' popularized these distinctly Japanese creations for a new generation, establishing Shigeru Mizuki as the greatest yokai hunter the world has ever known. He has flushed them out from their hiding spots, driving them from caves & swamp-bottoms & tree-hollows, doggedly tracking them across the diverse topography of the island nation, to record and draw them with a sometimes photographic exactitude. His work has aroused a new interest in these forgotten legends, which in time has become a popular obsession.

Without Mizuki's drawings, Totoro and the magical creatures of Miyazaki would never have seen the light of day. Many studies have been based on the work of Mizuki and a Yokai study chair has been opened at the University of Tokyo. This book lists the best drawings that Shigeru Mizukihas dedicated to the yokai and presents, in black and white or in color, each of the monsters by its name. A postface restores the historical and cultural dimension of the yokai, and will detail the major contribution of Shigeru Mizuki to the knowledge of these invisible beings.

Genres: Manga, Comics, Art

208 pages, Hardcover

Published February 16, 2017

About the author

Shigeru Mizuki (Mizuki Shigeru, 水木しげる) was a Japanese manga cartoonist, most known for his horror manga GeGeGe no Kitaro. He was a specialist in stories of yōkai and was considered a master of the genre. Mizuki was a member of The Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, and had travelled to over 60 countries in the world to engage in fieldwork of the yōkai and spirits of different cultures. He has been published in Japan, South Korea, France, Spain, Taiwan, the United States and Italy. He is also known for his World War II memoirs and his work as a biographer.

Reviews

[XenofoneX · Rating 5 out of 5]

This review looks at the first of three remarkable new art-book releases devoted to some of the greatest talents in sequential art, courtesy of two fantastic European publishers, Editions Cornelius & Glenat. 'Yokai', by Shigeru Mizuki, is a book I've been waiting for someone to make for a couple years now... and someone did. Thank you, Editions Cornelius. I've also been praying to my favorite fictional characters that this Bibliographic blessing isn't a one-time thing, some Bibliophile teaser to leave the werdverts with blue-binding. But seriously, Manga art doesn't get this kind of deluxe packaging often enough, so hopefully this is the beginning of a trend. Let's see some Satoshi Kon, Taiyo Matsumoto, Takehiko Inoue, and Kentaro Miura 'Collection Blaise' artbooks.


After reading many a fine review praising the manga mastery of Shigeru Mizuki, I was particularly impressed with a couple choice examples of his Yokai art. The Yokai are a distinctly Japanese imagining, a vague assortment of monsters, demons and phantasms, each possessing it's own rich & fanciful back-story, bizarre physiognomy, & idiosyncratic behavior. Some are hostile, some are benevolent, some are shy & reclusive; others are harmlessly mischievous, tossing red beans at unsuspecting travelers... which would probably be a creepy Whutdafuq?!-moment, I suppose.



The best comparison to the yokai for Westerners is a surprisingly close occidental analog; taken as a whole, the yokai bear a remarkable similarity to the fairies of British legend. Another island nation, and another family of whimsically diverse creatures, rooted in a melding of the Celtic mythology of the British Isles and Nordic-Germanic folklore, first carried across the channel by the Angles & Saxons - Pagan worshipers of Wotan/Odin - and refreshed by the Danish Vikings who decided to hang out a while, do a bit of rowdy farming and trade 'fairy tales' with the least annoying of their Christianized Saxon kin... once all the raping and pillaging was done, of course. And just as the kingdom of the Fae can be bureaucratically sorted into a complex taxonomic heirarchy of horseshit, with AD&D troglodytes jamming ogres, trolls, orcs, goblins, hobgoblins & knobgobblers onto one bellicose branch of Yggdrasil, the world tree, placing the Dwarves in Svartalfheim, the 'Light Elves' in Alfheim, with sprites, pixies, and leprechauns flitting and waddling from heim to heim, so too will you find a confusing array of yurei (ghosts), tsukumogami (tools that have been invaded by a spirit), oni (ogres & demons), obake (shape-shifters), ayakashi (yōkai that appear above the surface of some body of water), the occasional kami (Shinto demi-gods), and even the Shinigami (the now famous death-god featured in the beloved 'Death-Note' manga, anime, and not-so-great Netflix live-action film.



'Yokai - Shigeru Mizuki', unlike the various incarnations of the 'Yokai Dictionary' published in Japan & France, puts the focus squarely on Mizuki's incredible illustrations, where they fucking belong. I was disappointed with the reproductions of Mizuki's art in the dictionary - too small, shitty paper, mediocre resolution - so it's exciting to see the artwork given the respect it's due, in an oversized 12" x 9" landscape format hardcover. Part of the Editions Cornelius deluxe 'Blaise' line of artbooks, it has the same cloth spine & pictorial board design of other Blaise books like Ludovic Debeurme's 'Terra Maxima', with a sturdy sewn binding & high-quality archival stock... the paper is uncoated, but the blacks are rich and vivid, as are the 32 colored illustrations.



Mizuki's artwork is a fucking revelation, with a sophisticated blend of delicate pointillism and cross-hatching with near photographic realism, making the stylized characters & bizarre yokai an almost startling contrast that works beautifully... even though it shouldn't.


Since Cornelius made this particular wish a reality, I can only hope they'll do this for some of the other Manga masters who have been shackled to a 5" x 8" prison of pulpy shit... I'm a manga fan, but I hate the standard tankobon format; it's small & cheap & built to be tossed out like trash, thanks to paper which turns yellow & brittle after a couple years. This 208-page monograph is technically a French book, but the only text in the book is found in the last few pages of the appendix. 'Yokai' makes a perfect match for Jacob Covey's 'Beasts!' Vol. 1 & 2, and the other books in the Blaise collection, but it stands on its own as one of the best art-books of 2017.

Yokai Art Before & After Mizuki

I'm a huge fan of 19th Century Ukiyo-e, and the modern mutant strains that have slithered through Contempart security to hang themselves on Gallery walls, and into Japanese publishing houses to haunt the hard-drives & scanners to infect popular manga & anime. The crime-and-Yokai-based sub-species of Ukiyo-e are absolutely the dark progenitors of the post-modern tradition known as Ero-guro, even in the oeuvres of the two acknowledged masters of Ukiyo-e, Hokusai & Hiroshige. Their most talented followers, like Kuniyoshi, Yoshitoshi & Utagawa (names apparently given after they completed their apprenticeship), are slightly notorious for producing the most bloody and disturbing examples of Ukiyo-e, depicting the horrific crimes of the era in explicit detail, the violent history of pre-shogunate Sengoku-era Japan (more or less ending in the year 1600, with the climactic Battle of Seigensha, though it took another half-century of Machiavellian plotting & betrayals among the coalition of Warlords, Generals, and powerful Daimyo lords, to finally establish the Shogunate)... and the supernatural, of course. But that love of the grotesque isn't just a phenomenon unique to the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate... it's evident throughout Japanese history, in written & artistic form. The wood-block printing process of Ukiyo-e made it a populist medium: proto-manga, crime reportage, kabuki reviews celebrating star actors, yokai & demon folk-tales, ancient legends... anything that grabbed attention was fair game. Here's a few examples of Hokusai's dark side:



There's also an entire series of SC art-books by Jack Hunter, published by his own Creation Books... the design isn't the best, and the focus on over-the-top-gore is a bit sleazy, never mind overstated, but the material itself is fascinating:

Then there's this fantastic new release [above] from PIE Books, a brilliant Japanese publisher behind James Jean's latest and greatest retrospective 'Pareidolia'; I mention this because Jean is influenced by the same material we're bringing up, and because PIE does excellent work... I'll definitely be looking forward to picking up a copy:
Something Wicked from Japan: Ghosts, Demons & Yokai in Ukiyo-E Masterpieces
In terms of contemporary examples of Dark Ukiyo-e, the most high-profile example is award-winning illustrator Yuko Shimizu, who caught my attention with her comic-book covers for a DC-Vertigo series, 'The Unwritten'; they were some of the best I've seen since James Jean's covers for 'Fables', which was also a DC-Vertigo series... and the covers by both artists were the best thing about both titles. I have her Art Monograph from DGV, and highly recommend it, but I'm hoping to see a collection of her 'Unwritten' covers, which are so fucking good it was hard to settle on 6.






But my favorite Yokai art comes from the artistic genius of Fuyuko Matsui; instead of recreating the Ukiyo-e style, she faithfully and painstakingly creates modern work using the traditional Nihonga method to fuse the superstitious past & the scientific present, beauty & horror, figurative & abstract. Her premium HC Retrospective/Exhibition Catalog, with it's deceptively innocuous title, "Matsui Fuyuko: Making Friends with all the Children of the World" & sharply contrasting cover image of her own skeletal remains, taken from her modern 'Kurozu' sequence of paintings, is one of the best artbooks of the past 3 years.




Then there's the other master of modern Ero-Guro Ukiyo-e Yokai: illustrator turned fine artist Takato Yamamoto. I was drawn to his razor-sharp style years ago, with it's blend of super-clean Suehiro Maruo-style Ero-Guro line-work (which makes everything so much more sickening), truly over-the-top gore & sexual iconoclasm, the art nouveau of Aubrey Beardsley, and of course, the traditional Ukiyo-e aesthetic. It was only when I began learning of the Yokai that I saw his work with new eyes... the bizarre & sinister creatures populating his early work suddenly made a bit more sense, and the visionary later monographs are given an even stranger new context...

[Ghostcat · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a beautiful book, each drawing is fascinating and Impressive by its quality, this is truly a must have when you are passionate with Japanese mythology.