Mizuki’s Kitaro stories are both timelessly relevant and undeniably influential, inspiring a decades-long boom in stories about yokai, Japanese ghosts, and monsters.
Amazon has selected 20 books in an unranked order, and, in the Comics and Graphic Novels category, manga entries included Akiko Higashimura’s josei comedy Princess Jellyfish, published by Kodansha Comics (the digital version is on Crunchyroll) and Shigeru Mizuki’s seminal all-ages yokai manga Birth of Kitaro.
“Kitaro’s Birthday” reveals the origin story of the yokai boy Kitaro and his tiny eyeball father, Medama Oyaji.