Tono Monogatari

What it is

In 1910 Yanagita Kunio printed the tales that Sasaki Kizen had brought him from Tōno, in the mountains of Iwate: a hundred and nineteen short accounts of kappa in the river, children in the back room, women carried off to the mountains, the dead returning along the beach. A century later Mizuki Shigeru, past eighty, drew most of them. He keeps the order and the brevity of the originals, often their very words, and puts himself in the frame, trudging after Yanagita’s route, grumbling about his knees, and at the end meeting the author. The English edition carries the translator’s essays on what a kami is and what a yokai is, and on the book behind the book.

Yokai that appear

• Kappa 河童 — The red-faced kappa of the Sarugaishi river: footprints on the bank, a village woman who bears a kappa's child, the pool called Kappabuchi.
• Zashiki-warashi 座敷童子 — The children in the back room of the great houses, whose leaving foretells the house's fall.
• Tengu 天狗 — The tall men of the mountains who throw woodcutters and are called tengu.
• Yamauba 山姥 — The yama-onna, the mountain women seen combing their hair, and the village women carried off to live with them.
• Kitsune 狐 — The foxes that deceive travellers and that the hunters shoot in the hills.
• Yuki-onna 雪女 — The snow woman who comes out on the fifteenth day of the first month with many children, and the warning not to play on the hill that day.

How far from the record

This is the closest a manga comes to the record, because it is the record. The kappa of Tōno are red-faced, they leave footprints on the riverbank, and a woman of the village bears a kappa’s child; the zashiki-warashi leave a house just before its family dies of poisoned mushrooms; the mountain woman, tall and laughing, is seen combing her long black hair. Mizuki draws what the text says and no more, and the tales end where the text ends, often without an ending at all. The departures are Mizuki’s own presence and temper: as the book goes on his patience with the dry original wears thin, and the last pages are his, not Yanagita’s. Readers who want the plain text can read the 1910 book in translation; readers who want to see it can read this.

Where to read it

English

Tono Monogatari (external link) — Drawn & Quarterly, 1 volume (2021), complete

Spanish

No Spanish edition found

Indonesian

No Indonesian edition found