Dandadan

What it is

Momo Ayase believes in ghosts and not in aliens; Ken Takakura, whom she renames Okarun, believes the opposite. They test each other by going alone to a haunted tunnel and a UFO hotspot, and both turn out to be right. Momo comes back with psychic powers. Okarun comes back possessed by Turbo Granny, an old woman who sprints beside cars at impossible speed, and short two body parts that he spends the series trying to recover. From there Tatsu Yukinobu, serialising on Shōnen Jump+ since 2021, throws school legends, cryptids and alien conspiracies at one another with equal weight: Acrobatic Silky, the Evil Eye, Nessie, the Flatwoods Monster, the slit-mouthed woman. The anime by Science SARU made it one of the most-read manga in the world from 2024.

Yokai that appear

• Kuchisake-onna 口裂け女 — A nameless slit-mouthed woman in volume 9, then Reiko Kashima, "the slit-mouthed woman", who hunts Momo after ten at night from volume 10 and gets her own story in volume 14.

How far from the record

The yokai here are urban legends rather than village records, and the manga rewrites even those. Turbo Granny, in the legend told around Mount Rokkō since the late twentieth century, is a woman who runs on all fours beside cars in tunnels and nothing more; the manga has her steal Okarun’s genitals, take a beating and turn out to have comforted the ghosts of murdered girls, then seals her in a lucky-cat figurine. The slit-mouthed woman appears twice, once as a nameless yokai that Momo dispels and once as Reiko Kashima, who in the schoolyard tradition is a separate ghost, a legless woman who asks after her legs. The manga fuses the two, gives her a past and a rule that she hunts only after ten at night. Nessie, the Dover Demon and a Sumerian alien fight on the same footing as any of them. The premise says it plainly: yokai are the force that guards the Earth, and aliens cannot beat them. That is a comic-book cosmology with folklore names in it, drawn with real affection for the names.

Where to read it

English

Dandadan (external link) — VIZ Media (Shonen Jump), 21 volumes by October 2026, ongoing. New chapters appear in English on the Shonen Jump app

Spanish

Dan Da Dan (external link) — Norma Editorial, 21 volumes by July 2026, ongoing. Also published by Ivrea in Argentina and by Panini in Mexico

Indonesian

Dandadan (external link) — Elex Media Komputindo (Level Comics), 15 volumes or more since November 2024, ongoing