Learning from Monsters: Mizuki Shigeru's Yōkai and War Manga

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.