水木しげる（みずきしげる）
Mizuki Shigeru
The manga artist (1922–2015) whose GeGeGe no Kitarō gave the yokai their modern faces.
Mizuki grew up in Sakaiminato on the Sea of Japan, lost his left arm as a soldier in New Guinea, and drew for the rental-manga market in the 1950s. Hakaba Kitarō, his story of a one-eyed yokai boy, appeared in 1960; it was serialised in a weekly magazine from 1965 as GeGeGe no Kitarō and became a television cartoon in 1968, with new series in every decade since. Alongside it he published illustrated yokai encyclopaedias from the 1960s on, redrawing Sekien and Yanagita’s lists in his own hand.
His effect on the subject is hard to overstate. The nurikabe as a grey wall with eyes, the ittan-momen as a flying cloth with a face, the konaki-jiji and the sunekosuri as characters: Yanagita recorded the names in a line each, and Mizuki gave them bodies that every Japanese person now knows. The articles on this site separate those bodies from the records behind them.
Related yokai
Nurikabe
塗り壁（ぬりかべ）
A night-road obstruction that stops travelers like a wall, though the early record does not describe a visible body.
Ittan-momen
一反木綿（いったんもめん）
A white bolt of cloth that flutters across a rural night road, dazzles a traveler and attacks.
Konaki-jiji
児啼爺（こなきじじい）
A 1938 record from the Miyoshi mountains of Tokushima gives an old man's appearance and an infant's cry, in a single line. The famous part — that it grows unbearably heavy once you pick it up — is not in it.
Sunekosuri
脛擦り（すねこすり）
A naturalist writing a national dictionary of yokai in 1935 gave the Sunekosuri of Oda district about one line: dog shaped, on rainy nights, brushing between a traveller's legs as it passes. Everything else you have read about it came later.
Betobeto-san
べとべとさん（べとべとさん）
On a night road in Uda you hear a bita-bita footfall coming along behind you. There is nobody there. Step aside, say the words, and it stops — which is the entire record.
Gashadokuro
がしゃどくろ
Gashadokuro, the giant skeleton, looks ancient. It was created by the writer Saitō Morihiro in 1966, taken into Mizuki Shigeru's yokai collection in 1968, and later matched to a Kuniyoshi print from the 1840s that never used the name.
Bakezōri
化け草履（ばけぞうり）
A yokai scroll in the Nichibun collection shows a sandal monster covered in yellow straw, with a straw sandal for a face, riding a horse-head staff. It is stranger than the one-eyed singing sandal of modern books, and it comes with no story.