Back in 2015, I visited the rural Japanese town of Tono in Iwate prefecture, known as the “City of Folklore,” just a few years after the hundredth anniversary of the publication of the influential Japanese folklorist Kunio Yanagita’s 1910 masterwork Tono Monogatari, a slim, fascinating collection of 119 short vignettes told to him by local citizen Sasaki Kizen. At the same time, I noted that the acclaimed manga artist Shigeru Mizuki had published a comic adaption of the work to celebrate this anniversary, so when I noticed that it had been recently been translated into English, I was eager to read it. Mizuki takes Yanagita’s spare records of the valley's local stories, and crafts a thoughtful comic as the elderly manga artist depicts himself tramping across the Tono valley in the footsteps of Yanagita and Sasaki, making me feel like I was also visiting again.

As the creator of the seminal manga GeGeGe no Kitaro, Mizuki himself also had a significant role in popularizing the yokai and mystery of Japanese folklore both in Japan and across the world, making him an ideal conduit to explore this standard in Japanese folklore study. Along with background information provided by translator and folklorist Zack Davisson on the Shinto meanings behind these lore, the tales lend themselves to Mizuki’s comical yet grounded style. Both eerie and oddly prosaic, the tales reflect the everyday life and concerns of the people of this remote place, both their fears and their desires. Including legends of the kappa, the tengu, snow women, and other supernatural entities, other tales discuss local landmarks and eccentric townspeople while aspects of daily life like farming and hunting continue throughout. Mizuki’s sympathetic yet questioning musings are an ideal medium for revisiting Yanagita’s work and the integral place it has in Japanese folklore study. ( )

This is the English translation of the graphic novel adaptation of very short Japanese folktales originally recorded and adapted by Kunio Yanagita from oral folklore related to him in the early 1900s by Kizen Sasaki, who heard it from various relatives and members of the community around Tono, Japan. So we're playing a pretty big game of telephone here.

Basically, it's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, with Japanese peasants, hunters, and woodcutters minding their own business in the mountains, suddenly seeing an odd creature, spirit or ghost, yelling yikes, and either a) getting on with their day, b) gaining great fortune, or c) dying two days later. Most stories are only one or two pages, with a few getting an epic eight-page treatment.

Shigeru Mizuki inserts himself as a narrator, but instead of being, say, the Crypt-Keeper and playing up the creepiness, he's more like your old grandfather, just shaking his head and going, "Huh, how 'bout that." (He also brings along his Kitaro character for a cameo.)

Interesting for what it is, but mostly dull and repetitive. ( )