Hozuki's Coolheadedness

What it is

Hell is a bureaucracy of eight great hells and eight cold ones, split into hundreds of sub-hells; King Enma is a kindly, overworked boss, and the one who actually runs the place is Hōzuki, his chief aide, an oni with a spiked club and no patience. Eguchi Natsumi drew it for Morning from 2011 to 2020, one workplace gag at a time: staff appraisals for the demons who torture the damned, a rabbit from the Kachi-kachi Yama tale on the payroll, Momotarō and his animals employed by the pharmacy of Hōzuki’s rival. That rival is Hakutaku, the Chinese beast of wisdom, here a hard-drinking womaniser who only shows his true shape when drunk. The cast keeps growing until most of the names in a yokai dictionary have clocked in somewhere.

Yokai that appear

• Nurarihyon 滑瓢 — An old man who turns up in hell claiming the title of supreme commander of the yokai; a joke on the modern image, since the Edo pictures give him no rank.
• Hakutaku 白澤 — Hōzuki's rival: the Chinese beast of wisdom as a drunken herbalist, in human form except when drunk; from volume 2.
• Oni 鬼 — The staff of hell, Hōzuki first among them: horned, fond of drink, carrying out the sentences.
• Zashiki-warashi 座敷童子 — Ichiko and Niko, twin house-spirits adopted by Hōzuki as daughters.
• Kitsune 狐 — Dakki, the nine-tailed fox, and the foxes who staff the Yakan café.
• Bake-danuki 化け狸 — Shukaku, the tanuki of the Bunbuku tea-kettle, and the tanuki of the Shikoku legends, including Inugami Gyōbu.
• Kasha 火車 — The cat that snatches corpses, now employed in the department that collects the dead.
• Kirin 麒麟 — The auspicious beast, a visitor to Hakutaku's pharmacy.
• Tengu 天狗 — The crow-tengu police force of hell, commanded by Minamoto no Yoshitsune.
• Shuten-dōji 酒呑童子 — Runs a sake shop; his son joins the jailers.
• Nekomata 猫又 — The staff of the tabloid Nekomata-sha, whose cat reporter chases gossip from volume 2.
• Oiwa お岩 — Chōchin-Oiwa, the lantern ghost of the Yotsuya story as Hokusai drew her, a character from volume 2.
• Kodama 木霊 — A tree spirit of the mountains, in one episode.

How far from the record

The architecture is orthodox: the eight hells and their sub-hells follow the Buddhist sutra that the hell paintings of the temples also follow, and the manga’s Enma, the Ten Kings and the road to the underworld are where the paintings put them. The personalities are not. The hakutaku of the record is a beast that taught the Yellow Emperor the names of all the spirits, and whose picture was hung in Edo houses against cholera; here he runs a pharmacy in the peach-blossom paradise and quarrels with Hōzuki over women and drink. The zashiki-warashi are twins Hōzuki adopts. The nurarihyon who turns up wanting the title of supreme commander of the yokai is a joke on the modern image of him, not on the record, which gives him no such rank. The author has named Mizuki Shigeru’s work and the old-tale cartoons of her childhood as her sources, and the table of contents carries the line, “This manga is fiction, but hell may exist.”

Where to read it

English

Hozuki's Coolheadedness (external link) — Kodansha, 31 volumes (2017–2026), digital only, complete

Spanish

No Spanish edition found

Indonesian

No Indonesian edition found