I’m completely won over by YŌKAIDEN: VOLUME 1, Nina Matsumoto’s debut manga. Its title comes from the word yōkai, which means Japanese spirits, 100 of which 9-year-old Hamachi is keen on conjuring up, using an old book of folk tales. He fails, but the next morning awakens to find a gappa in the forest, with one leg stuck in an animal trap.
A gappa is a tall, gangly green creature with a turtle-like shell and a hankering for cucumbers. Hamachi tells the gappa the only way he can free him is by chopping off his leg. The ax falls, but at least Hamachi is nice enough to craft him a peg leg.
With his parents dead, Hamachi lives with his grumpy grandmother. Not long after the encounter with the gappa, however, she turns up dead, presumably murdered by the gappa, believing she’s the one who set the trap. Hamachi has no choice but to avenge her death by entering the realm of the yōkai.
On his journey, he meets a variety of creatures, including ones whose sole purposes are to lick grime and wash beans, a demon who skins the feet of bad kids, a chimera, a guy with eyeballs on his palms (paging Guillermo del Toro!) and a talking broken umbrella. Hamachi also finds a reluctant friend in a paper lantern with an abnormally large tongue.
Hamachi’s exploits are filled with action, but notably with a solid dose of sharp humor. While Matsumoto’s art is absolutely wonderful, it’s the writing that sets YŌKAIDEN above from the pack. Part of its clarity has to come from the fact that it’s not a translation, having been written in English (Matsumoto lives in Canada). It even reads left to right, unlike a manga of Japanese origin. (For further proof of her razor wit, flip to the hilarious half-dozen four-panel comic strips in the extras section.)
Its light blend of fantasy and adventure reminded me of THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES by way of Hayao Miyazaki’s PRINCESS MONONOKE. It’s charming as hell to the point of being buoyant, and ends on a cliffhanger that leaves me wanting to read VOLUME 2, like, yesterday. —Rod Lott
