Mononoke

What it is

The Medicine Seller walks into a house, a ship, an inn or a train and finds a mononoke there, a spirit fastened to a human wrong. He cannot draw his sword until he has its shape, its truth and its reason, so each story is an inquest, and the yokai’s name is the verdict. Ninagawa Yaeko drew the first version for Young Gangan in 2007, adapting the Bakeneko episodes of the 2006 anthology Ayakashi, and from 2013 to 2019 she redrew the whole television series for Monthly Comic Zenon, one yokai per book: Umibōzu, Zashiki-warashi, Nue, Nopperabō and the 1920s Bakeneko that ends it. The 2024 film Karakasa has a manga of its own by the film’s character designer, Nagata Kitsuneko. None of these has been translated; what readers abroad know is the anime.

Yokai that appear

• Bakeneko 化け猫 — The mononoke of the first story, a cat born of a murdered girl in an Edo household, and of the last, on a train in the 1920s.
• Umi-bōzu 海坊主 — A ship becalmed in the Dragon's Triangle; the sea's anger turns out to be a monk's buried guilt (two volumes, 2014).
• Zashiki-warashi 座敷童子 — An inn that was once a brothel; the children in its walls are the ones the house never let be born.
• Nue 鵺 — Suitors at an incense contest die one by one; the chimera takes shape from their greed for a piece of sacred wood.
• Noppera-bō — A woman confesses to murder; a faceless masked spirit offers to free her, and the Medicine Seller finds who erased whom.
• Karakasa-kozō 唐傘小僧 — The mononoke of the 2024 film and of its manga by Nagata Kitsuneko: an umbrella spirit loose in the shogun's inner palace.

How far from the record

Every mononoke here is a human crime wearing a yokai’s name. The bakeneko is a murdered girl’s cat avenging her; the umibōzu is a monk’s guilt over the sister who gave herself to the sea; the zashiki-warashi are the children an innkeeper forced her women to abort; the nue rises out of greed for a piece of sacred wood; the nopperabō comes to free a woman who has erased herself. The recorded creatures carry none of this. The bakeneko of the tales is a cat that has lived too long and learned to dance, the umibōzu a black giant that rises from a calm sea, the zashiki-warashi a child who brings a house its luck and leaves before the house fails. The director of the anime, Nakamura Kenji, has described the look as borrowed from ukiyo-e, flat and sharply outlined, and the spirits as a voice for people no one hears, and the manga keeps that reading. What it takes from folklore is the vocabulary. The grammar is its own.

Where to read it

English

No English edition found

Spanish

No Spanish edition found

Indonesian

No Indonesian edition found