Japanese folktales | Musings of the Monster Librarian

Musings: Shigeru Mizuki’s Yokai and Shoji Ohtomo’s Kaiju: Love Is In The Details

I attended G-Fest this past weekend with my son, who is a huge Godzilla and kaiju fan (for those of you who don’t know what kaiju are, they are giant Japanese movie monsters, most of which have been created since the original Godzilla movie premiered in 1954. If you are a Gen Xer, you probably saw them on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon television).

While I’m not a huge Godzilla fan myself, I have lived with two of them, and it’s an education. But their enthusiasm in collecting action figures and watching the movies is nothing compared to the contagious love of the genre and almost everything about it that I experienced at G-Fest. You have to dig deep to find the kind of information some of the people running the sessions shared.

Yokai daizaiku (electric yokai) anatomical drawing by Shigeru Mizuki, courtesy of Monster Brains

The last session I attended was about art depicting Japanese monsters. One of the artists responsible for documenting Japanese monsters put incredible effort and artistry into depicting Japanese folk monsters, called yokai, particularly in the manga series Ge Ge No Kitaro. Eisner Award winner Shigeru Mizuki started out drawing pictures for Japanese story theaters called kamishibai, before the popularity of manga, studied and drew yokai from both the outside and inside (unfortunately, he died in 2015).

Drawing near the same time was another artist, Shoji Ohtomo. What Mizuki did for yokai, Ohtomo did for kaiju. His drawings show how interested he was in the details of what made kaiju work, and many people called him “Dr. Kaiju”. Unfortunately, while you can find a reasonable amount of information on Shigeru Mizuki, it’s not as easy to find the same

Cross-section of King Ghidorah (left), photo of Shoji Ohtomo (right).

about Shoji Ohtomo. Here’s a short piece I found over at Monster Brains that includes several of his anatomical drawings. And a few of my very blurry photos from the session, run by Stan Hyde.

Anatomical drawings of Gappa (left) and Gamera (right) by Shoji Ohtomo.

You have to really care about monsters to want to imagine what they would be like inside if they weren’t fictional characters represented by an actor in a rubber suit.

Shoji Ohtomo is also credited by some with the original design of Ultraman, an alien kaiju fighter. Ohtomo’s original drawing appears on the right, with more finished designs on the left. Before I became a children’s librarian, I wanted to be an archivist and manuscripts librarian, and getting to see the details that go into the process of creation, whether it is drafts of a poem by Sylvia Plath or the development of a character like Ultraman is why I wanted to do that.

Original drawing and cross-sections for Ultraman, by Shoji Ohtomo

It’s easy to write off some of these films as cheesy B-movies. As a genre, they do indeed have their cheesy, goofy moments. But there are many talented artists in a variety of mediums who have contributed to the development of kaiju eiga films and there is a lot more going on than there seems to be on the surface. Because so much of what makes these movies work occurred (and occurs) in Japan, and (at least given my experience at this convention) many of the makers and actors aren’t known outside Japan(three of the special guests needed a translator), most people don’t get to appreciate that.

What does any of this have to do with the horror genre? Well, if it had nothing to do with it, this would still be really cool to see. But besides stories about giant monsters being part of the stock in trade, many creators in the horror genre expend the same kind of attention to detail in crafting their art, and in the past have found their work similarly dismissed. I encourage you to explore the different ways monsters and horror are experienced around the world, so you can see that love of the genre expressed in the many different ways people perceive it. Look further, and find even more to love.

Musings: Drawing on the Walls: The Boy Who Drew Cats

The Boy Who Drew Cats adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe

Holiday House, 2002

ISBN-13: 978-0823415946

Available: Used hardcover and paperback, Audible audiobook

I had a reader request the name of a book about a little boy drawing all over the walls. The classic story about a boy drawing himself into a story is Harold and the Purple Crayon by Crockett Johnson, but that didn’t seem quite right. I finally remembered a Japanese folktale about a boy who drew all over the walls of a temple and drove a demon away, and was able to find what I think is really the answer to this question; it’s a story called “The Boy Who Drew Cats”, and it has been adapted and illustrated many times. The copy pictured above was adapted by Lafcadio Hearn and Margaret Hodges, and illustrated by Aki Sogabe, but there are MANY other versions.

The story follows a young man who is obsessed with drawing cats; he draws only cats, but he draws them amazingly well. Forced to leave home to find a trade, he spends the night in an abandoned temple, with empty screens all around, just begging to be painted with cats. After painting the walls, the boy falls asleep, waking in the night to hear a tremendous fight. In the morning, he discovers a terrible rat demon, dead, and notices the cats on the screens are not in the same positions he had painted them in. His cats have defeated the monster and saved his life, revealing his artistic ability and enabling him to become a professional artist.

Walls can be the source of creativity, as they are in the nonfiction picture book Painting for Peace in Ferguson, a story about the creative approach the community of Ferguson took to beautify and inspire neighborhoods where the buildings had been boarded up or defaced following demonstrations against police brutality that turned violent. They can become a personification of insanity or paranoia, as they are in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, in which the protagonist has delusions of a trapped woman creeping behind the room’s wallpaper, or the whispers from her dead mother that one character hears in Amy Lukavics’ The Women in the Walls.

Walls can be an “in-between” place, as they are in Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls and Coraline, in which the main characters have to make choices about whether they will be passive or active participants in their own lives. If you are on the outside, walls can be a barrier you look to cross that conceal a treasure inside, as in The Secret Garden, and if you are on the inside they can be a trap– a haunted house that won’t let go, a locked-room mystery you can’t escape, like the inhabitants of the island in Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. If you are the builder, like Hugh Crain in The Haunting of Hill House, you can make the walls be disorienting and disturbing to inhabitants to influence their minds, and if you want to keep people away, like Baba Yaga, you can decorate with human skulls.

Or you can follow your passion where it goes, and both protect and beautify the world by transforming walls into something new, like the boy who drew cats.