Shigeru Mizuki, Influential Japanese Cartoonist, Dies at 93
By JONATHAN SOBLE

TOKYO — Shigeru Mizuki, an influential and widely popular Japanese cartoonist with a talent for humanizing mythical monsters and dissecting the monstrous side of humanity, died here on Monday. He was 93.

The cause was multiple organ failure, his office, Mizuki Productions, said. He had undergone emergency surgery several weeks earlier after falling and hitting his head, the office said.

Mr. Mizuki was admired by generations of Japanese animators and won fans abroad with his style, which combined a love of the grotesque with sympathy and breezy humor.

His most popular work, about the adventures of a one-eyed ghost-boy named Kitaro, spawned an empire of live-action and animated films, a musical, and five television series — a reboot every decade from the 1960s to the 2000s. The series’ battles between fantastic creatures were the template for later Japanese fare, like Pokémon.

But Mr. Mizuki also took on serious subjects in graphic form, including the barbarities of war, drawn in part from his own harrowing combat experiences in World War II, and the rise of Adolf Hitler. His life was the subject of films and acclaimed autobiographical works.

Even in a country as saturated with manga and anime as Japan, few artists rivaled Mr. Mizuki in commercial success or distinctiveness of vision. He was ranked with Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy and probably Japan’s most lauded animator, who died in 1989 at 60.

Mr. Mizuki, who was known for his humility, was reluctant to make such a comparison himself, however.

“Tezuka was always working through the night, and he died young,” Mr. Mizuki said in a speech on receiving a national cultural award in 2003. “I’ve spent my life half-asleep, and I’ve lived a long time.”

He was born Shigeru Mura on March 8, 1922, in Osaka to a wealthy family in the wholesale business. The family moved to rural Tottori Prefecture when Mr. Mizuki was a boy and fell into financial trouble during the Depression. He took the pen name Mizuki from the name of a guesthouse in which he stayed as he developed his early work after World War II.

He made his start before the war drawing story panels used by street-corner raconteurs. He was drafted into the army in 1943, just as the tide of the war was turning decisively against Japan.

Sent to Rabaul, a town on New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea, Mr. Mizuki escaped an American machine-gun ambush by diving from a cliff into the sea, he recounted in a memoir, “Neboke Jinsei,” or “Half-Asleep Life.” Most members of his platoon were killed.

When he turned up at camp days later, ragged and missing his rifle, his commander accused him of dishonoring himself by not dying with his comrades. The attitude surprised and disgusted him, he said, and it emerged later in works that were deeply critical of the war.

Mr. Mizuki lost his left arm in Rabaul, when a field hospital where he was recovering from malaria was struck by United States bombers. But he outlasted the conflict and was repatriated to Japan in 1945.

There he returned to drawing, and by the 1950s he was experimenting with the burgeoning medium of serialized comics.

His first story, “Rocketman,” was published in 1958. It brazenly copied American superhero imagery — one character wears a cape, tights and an “S” on his chest — and meshed it with the occult themes that would become his signature. In the story, an astronaut is murdered on his way to space, but comes back to life as a giant, vengeful flying sea urchin.

The first Kitaro story appeared in 1960 as “Hakaba no Kitaro,” or “Kitaro From the Graveyard.” Its characters were inspired by ghosts and demons from traditional Japanese folk tales, which Mr. Mizuki said he had loved since he was a child. Kitaro’s father is a phantasm with an eyeball for a head. His main rival is a greedy half-ghost, half-human named Rat Man.

Children loved the escapist fantasy — “Monsters don’t have exams or school!” went the theme song of the TV version — while adults found wry satire in the comic depravity of the supernatural characters.

Mr. Mizuki changed the “graveyard” name, at the insistence of sponsors, to the softer “GeGeGe no Kitaro” – a play on the sound of spooky laughter and the stuttered way in which Mr. Mizuki pronounced his given name as a boy.

For more serious projects, Mr. Mizuki turned to different sorts of ghosts, those of history. His first-person accounts of his war experience, most famously in “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths,” from 1973, used a light touch to deliver unsparing criticism of suicide squadrons, the mistreatment of “comfort women” in military brothels and other cruelties.

His graphic novel about Hitler’s rise, first published in Japanese in 1971, came out in a widely praised English translation this year. In 1979, decades before the Fukushima nuclear accident shone a spotlight on Japan’s atomic power industry, he illustrated a magazine exposé of worker exploitation at the facility, titled “Darkness at the Fukushima Nuclear Plant.”

His survivors include his wife, Nunoe Mura; a younger brother; and two daughters.

“Mizuki-san experienced the war, came home alive and thought hard about what he should do with his life, then went out and did it,” Leiji Matsumoto, the creator of the animated sci-fi series Space Battleship Yamato, told the Japanese national broadcaster NHK. “I wanted him to live to 100 and tell even more stories.”

「鬼太郎」獨臂漫畫家 水木茂93歲病逝

以「鬼太郎」、「惡魔君」等妖怪漫畫享譽世界的日本漫畫家水木茂，30日因器官衰竭病逝於東京某醫院，享壽93歲；他91歲的弟弟說，「哥哥搞不好到天國和妖怪做朋友了。」

筆下妖怪 多幼年親身經歷

本名武良茂的水木茂之前對媒體說，小時候來家裡煮飯、當保母的婆婆是唯一會稱讚他的人，對五歲的孩子來說比糖果零食更寶貴。婆婆常和他講妖怪的事，水木茂也對妖怪、亡靈的存在深信不疑，他說，鬼太郎出現的妖怪，多是小時候的親身經歷。

風靡孩童 因幽默多過恐怖

在水木的筆下，理應恐怖的妖怪多了一分幽默。1960年代末，鬼太郎卡通深獲孩童喜愛，有人說，如同他寫的片頭曲歌詞：「妖怪世界沒學校、沒考試」，當時被課業競爭壓得喘不過氣的日本小孩，被妖怪世界填滿空虛。

戰時失去左腕、戰後生活貧困，水木不曾失去少年時的夢想，作品也常傳達反戰意念。家鄉鳥取縣境港市成立水木茂博物館，館長庒司行男說，「他的天真瀾漫及赤子之心，沒有隨著年紀增長改變。」

自宅跌倒 撐半月仍挺不過

日本警視廳表示，水木茂是11月11日在東京調布市的自宅跌倒、撞到頭入院。鄰居記得，水木常說「我會活到100歲。」

摔倒送醫後，水木的妻子還告訴鄰人，丈夫慢慢就會好了，結果再也沒離開醫院。水木遺孀說，到最後丈夫已無法說話，只剩下眼神交流。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/arts/design/shigeru-mizuki-influential-japanese-cartoonist-dies-at-93.html

2015-12-01．聯合報．A13．國際．東京記者雷光涵