Mizuki Shigeru Road – All Yokai Encyclopedia (Bunshun Shinsho 1372)

A complete guide to all 194 bronze statues, including 177 on Mizuki Shigeru Road and 11 on Oki Island!

Sakaiminato City in Tottori Prefecture is the hometown of Shigeru Mizuki, a manga artist known for GeGeGe no Kitaro.
Sakaiminato City is famous for its bronze statues of yokai that line both sides of its main street.

If you fly in, Yonago Airport will be called “Kitaro Airport”, and if you take the JR Sakai Line train, it will be called “Kitaro Train”. If you enter Sakaiminato City, you will find the Kitaro Police Box and the Kitaro Post. Anyway, it’s a youkai parade.

And the biggest icon of the city is the bronze statue of a youkai. The number continues to increase year by year, and there are currently 177! If you include the statues on Oki Island, the prefectural office, and JR stations, the number exceeds 200.

In 2018, the city of Sakaiminato carried out a large-scale relocation of the bronze statues that had been lined up chaotically. Currently, they are arranged according to the classifications of “the world of Mizuki manga”, “yokai living in the forest”, “yokai who control gods, buddhas and good fortune”, “yokai hiding in familiar places”, and “yokai living in homes”.

This book is the latest encyclopedia that covers the current yokai bronze statues. Each bronze statue is modeled after a yokai depicted in Shigeru Mizuki’s manga, but they are three-dimensional and extremely realistic. The manga “GeGeGe no Kitaro” is of course a perfect guidebook for anyone interested in yokai.

This book is also the official text for the “Yokai Kentei” held once a year in Sakaiminato and Chofu.