In/Spectre

What it is

At eleven, Kotoko Iwanaga was taken by the yokai and came back with one eye and one leg, and with a job: she is their goddess of wisdom, the person they bring their disputes to. Her boyfriend Kurō Sakuragawa is worse off and better armed, since his grandmother fed him the flesh of a kudan and of a mermaid as a child, so he cannot die and can choose which near future comes true. Shirodaira Kyō wrote the 2011 novel, Katase Chasiba has drawn it since 2015, and the long first case sets the method: a dead idol has become an internet ghost, Steel Lady Nanase, because enough people believe in her, and Kotoko defeats her by posting four rival explanations until belief drains away. Later cases bring a snow woman asking to clear her human friend of murder, and an Edo samurai who may have killed one.

Yokai that appear

• Kudan 件 — Its flesh, fed to Kurō as a child, is the source of his power to choose the future; the premise from volume 1, explained in the Steel Lady Nanase case (volumes 2–6).
• Ningyo 人魚 — The mermaid's flesh that makes Kurō unkillable, eaten together with the kudan.
• Yuki-onna 雪女 — A snow woman asks Kotoko to clear her human friend of murder (volumes 12–13); an Edo samurai who killed one is the case of volume 18.
• Kappa 河童 — One of the local yokai who bring Kotoko their troubles, from the first case.

How far from the record

The kudan of the record is a calf with a human face, born once in a generation, which speaks one prophecy about the harvest or the war and dies within days; it was first written down in 1819 and sold as a charm on broadsheets from the 1830s. Here its flesh, eaten, becomes a permanent power over the future, and it is fused with the older story of the mermaid’s flesh that gives eight hundred years of life. The yuki-onna of the twelfth and thirteenth volumes is nearer her type, a woman of the snow who has befriended a human and fears for him, and the Edo-era case of the eighteenth volume treats a snow woman as one suspect among others, a detective’s reframing rather than a ghost story’s. The thesis that holds the series together, that yokai exist because people believe and can be unmade by a better story, is the authors’ own, and it is a modern idea about folklore rather than something folklore says of itself. Kotoko’s missing eye and leg echo the one-eyed, one-legged smith gods of the mountains, which the manga leaves as an echo.

Where to read it

English

In/Spectre (external link) — Kodansha, 21 volumes by May 2026, ongoing

Spanish

No Spanish edition found

Indonesian

No Indonesian edition found