Mononoke — Shigeru Mizuki's Catalogue of Yōkai
Mononoke gathers Shigeru Mizuki's illustrations of yōkai—the supernatural beings of Japanese folklore that inhabit shadows, forgotten corners, attics, and the edges of everyday life. Rather than following characters through a continuous story, the book presents these figures as individual drawings, each placed within detailed landscapes, interiors, or encounters with people.
The approach is that of a classifier rather than a storyteller. Each illustration is accompanied by the creature's name, in both black-and-white and colour, and the volume closes with an alphabetical index giving further notes on each yōkai's nature and, where relevant, its period or regional origin. The register moves between the unsettling, the comic, and the simply strange, resisting any single tone across the collection.
For readers approaching yōkai as visual culture, and for collectors following Éditions Cornélius, Mononoke functions as an image archive and reference object rather than a narrative work. As an artist publication, it sits between folklore documentation and the illustrated book tradition, concerned with looking, naming, and preserving forms that once circulated through oral legend.
Shigeru Mizuki (1922–2015) was a Japanese manga artist drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army in 1942 and stationed in Rabaul, where he lost his left arm during an air raid—an experience that shaped his lifelong pacifism. He later found wide recognition with GeGeGe no Kitarō, and across his career combined storytelling with sustained visual documentation of yōkai, helping to define their place in modern Japanese popular culture. Further titles by the artist are available in the Shigeru Mizuki collection.
Published by Éditions Cornélius in the Collection Blaise series. The text is in French.
