Yo-kai Watch

What it is

Keita Amano, called Nate in the English edition, frees a ghost butler named Whisper from a capsule machine in the woods and receives a watch that lets him see the yokai behind everyday annoyances: the one that makes you hungry, the one that makes you fart, the cat ghost Jibanyan, run over by a truck and still fighting trucks. Konishi Noriyuki drew the gag manga for Monthly CoroCoro Comic alongside the games and the anime from 2012 to 2023, and it won the children’s manga prizes of both big publishers. The yokai are a collector’s roster, hundreds of them, most invented for the franchise and a handful carrying names from the old books.

Yokai that appear

• Kitsune 狐 — Kyubi, the nine-tailed fox, who trains Jibanyan in the manga.
• Noppera-bō — The faceless yokai, here one that renders people emotionless.
• Satori 覚 — Satori-chan, the mind-reader, given an origin in people's dislike of shallow talk.
• Oni 鬼 — The red oni (Gargaros in English) and the blue oni, rulers of the Oni Time; the manga gives the red one a backstory of spurned friendship.

How far from the record

The franchise was built to be the next long-running children’s property, and its yokai were designed first as collectables: cute, punning, sorted into tribes, each the cause of a small human failing. The recorded names that survive are given new psychology. The nopperabō does not frighten travellers with a blank face; it drains people of emotion. Satori, the mountain thing that reads thoughts, becomes Satori-chan, born of everyone’s dislike of shallow conversation. The red oni, who once tried to befriend humans and was spurned, now rules the Oni Time in which children are chased. The nine-tailed fox is a trainer of younger yokai. The English edition renamed the children and the town and most of the yokai, so that an English reader meets the names of the record even less often than a Japanese one. Scholars have used the series as the model case of yokai remade to be cute rather than frightening, and the manga is exactly that.

Where to read it

English

Yo-kai Watch (external link) — VIZ Media, 23 volumes (2015–2024), complete

Spanish

Yo-kai Watch (external link) — Norma Editorial, 14 of 23 volumes; the series appears to have stalled. Published complete in Mexico by Panini in 28 half-volumes

Indonesian

Yo-kai Watch (external link) — Elex Media Komputindo, published from 2015; volume count unconfirmed and apparently out of print