THE TRIAL OF KITARO

TRIAL OF KITARO, THE SHIGERU MIZUKI

The final showdown for the legendary yokai! In the seventh volume of Shigeru Mizuki’s defining series, our beloved hero Kitaro stands accused of beating up his fellow yokai to protect the human populace. He is put on trial for crimes against yokai. Witnesses are called from both sides, but when Nezumi Otoko takes the stand, all bets are off. Will Nezumi Otoko be for Kitaro or against him? Only the biggest bribe will tell! The Trial of Kitaro features five bizarre and amusing adventures. In every story, Kitaro has his hands full. He faces off against Kasha, a vicious demon cat; tries to quell a magical cooking pot; battes a sea monster; and solves the mystery of a three-eyed bird. This volume features comics from the late 1960s, which was the golden age of GeGeGe no Kitaro. These stories appear in English for the first time in a kid-friendly edition, with translations by the Mizuki scholar and series translator Zack Davisson. The Trial of Kitaro also concludes Davisson’s “History of Kitaro” essay and offers another round of “Yokai Files,” which introduce the folklore of Japan’s monsters and supernatural beings. This final volume of Mizuki’s renowned Kitaro series is not to be missed!

SHIGERU MIZUKI

Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015) was one of Japan's most respected artists and a forefather of manga. He invented the yokai genre with GeGeGe no Kitaro and founded the gekiga—dramatic manga— movement with autobiographical wartime accounts such as Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. He received the Kodansha Manga Award, the Eisner Award, and the Angouleme Award, as well as the Shiju Hosho Medal of Honor and the Order of the Rising Sun. Shigeru Mizuki was a specialist in stories of yokai. As a member of the Japanese Society of Cultural Anthropology, he traveled to sixty countries around the world to engage in fieldwork on the spirits of different cultures. He has been published in Japan, South Korea, France, Spain, Taiwan, and Italy.