Shigeru Mizuki

Shigeru Mizuki was a Japanese manga artist and historian, known for his yokai manga such as GeGeGe no Kitaro and Akuma-kun, and his war stories based on his own war experiences. He was born in Osaka, but grew up in Sakaiminato, Tottori, where he developed an interest in the supernatural and the folklore of yokai. He was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942 and sent to New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea, where he contracted malaria, lost his left arm in an explosion, and witnessed the horrors of war. He was the only survivor of his unit and was ordered to die by his superior officer, but he refused and managed to return to Japan. He married Nunoe Mura, a woman who had exchanged letters with him during the war, in 1948. He started his career as a kamishibai artist, drawing pictures for paper theater, and later became a manga artist. He created his most famous character, Kitaro, a boy who is the last survivor of a yokai tribe, in 1959. He also wrote manga about his war experiences, such as Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths and Showa: A History of Japan, as well as biographies of historical figures, such as Hitler and Musashi. He was a prolific and influential artist, who won many awards and honors, such as the Eisner Award, the Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize, the Order of the Rising Sun, and the Person of Cultural Merit. He died of heart failure in 2015 at the age of 93.