It’s Spooky Season! – Day 8: Hakaba Kitaro

We’ve gotten more than a week into this Halloween list without talking much about Yokai, so I figure it’s about time to remedy that. Yokai are a category of spiritual entity within Japanese folklore. It’s a broad term that encompasses both malevolent and benign spiritual beings, with forms that run the gamut from inanimate objects to animals to humanoids. While the concept of Yokai has existed in Japanese culture for centuries, it was the late manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, who as a child was taught about them by an older female relative, who re-popularized them within a pop-culture context.

Mizuki’s most well-known (and adapted) creation is Gegege no Kitaro, which tells the story of a boy named Kitaro, last survivor of the Ghost Tribe, who has interactions with various other Yokai. The story has been adapted over the years into various anime series, including a contemporary one available to watch on Crunchyroll. The adaptation I’m sharing today is a more obscure and self-contained one, dubbed Hakaba Kitaro (Graveyard Kitaro) after the original title of the manga, which was released as part of the noitaminA animation block back in 2008.

Hakaba Kitaro is set in the mid 20th Century, and serves as an origin story for Kitaro, Medama Oyaji, and the other iconic characters from the series. It also holds closer in tone to Mizuki’s original manga version, which is darker and grittier than the later more cartoonish interpretations. Kitaro in particular has a bit of a darker and more mischievous personality than in some of the other animated versions.

Aside from the generally appealing aspects of the series – it’s short and self-contained and features a cool etched wood visual style – its loose background plot mirrors that of Japan’s reconstruction following World War II. As the characters work through being generally downtrodden and impoverished, time continues on and the series ends with the Tokyo 1964 Summer Olympic stadium’s construction.

The unfortunate thing about this series is that it’s particularly unavailable; it came onto the scene before legal anime streaming in the US was really a thing and has never had a domestic disc release, so the only way to really experience it involves legally gray means (and a cursory search I performed just prior to writing this tells me even those methods may come up short). However, if you can get your hands on a copy it’s well worth your trouble and would serve as a nice companion piece to one of the more available anime adaptations.