The artist who has bestowed the world with some amazing horror manga and faced death like situation during World War II, Shigeri Mizuki, faced the undefeatable faith; death, this Monday morning at the age of 93.
Known for his GeGeGe no Kitaro series depicting yokai, the spirits and monsters of Japanese folklore, Mizuki whose real name was Shigeru Mura, died due to multiple organ failure at a Tokyo hospital. He was earlier hospitalised on 11 November after he fell and hit his head at his Tokyo home. He underwent emergency surgery and had temporarily recovered at one point.
A specialist in yokai (a sub genre in Japanese horror), Mizuki went through a lot of hardships before becoming a cartoonist. He barely survived World War II, during which he was sent to Rabaul, a scene of fierce fighting, in what is now Papua New Guinea where he suffered from malaria and lost his left arm in a U.S. airstrike.
In an earlier interview with AFP, Mizuki said, “You were never allowed to retreat (from) the front, you had to stay until you died. Rank and file soldiers were treated ‘not as human beings, but were thought to be something less than horses’.”
His military experiences inspired him to come up with stories based on his on field encounters. Mizuki has published numerous works, both on y?kai and military works along with books on many subjects, including an autobiography about his time on New Britain Island and a manga biography on Adolf Hitler.
In 2003, a museum dedicated to Mizuki opened in Sakaiminato city in Tottori where the residents named the city’s shopping district “Mizuki Shigeru Road” which displays more than 100 bronze statues of the story’s characters like Kitaro and a mouselike man named Nezumi Otoko, on both sides of the road.
In his hall of fame, he has bagged many awards and achievements especially for GeGeGe no Kitaro. His life has been eternalised in a popular television drama series in 2010 which talked about the life of Mizuki and his wife, Nunoe Mura.
The guy who taught the world how to embrace death and more importantly showed how to accept and celebrate strangeness in the world through his works, will be missed and cherished forever.