ABSTRACT
The history of Japanese folklore studies is inextricably linked to the history of Japan’s imperial ambitions in East Asia. Its particular blend of historiography and mythography runs in close parallel to intellectual currents that sought to justify the colonization of Korea. These currents emphasize how in Japan’s mythic past the imperial family received a divine mandate to subjugate other ethnic groups inhabiting the archipelago, such as the Ainu and the Emishi. In Kieyuku shōjo [Disappearing Girl], Japanese comic artist Shirato Sanpei makes use of one of the more infamous figures from Yanagita Kunio’s 1910 Tōno monogatari [Tales from Tōno], the yama otoko or “mountain man,” through an inversion characteristic of Shirato’s work. No longer dark and brutish, the “mountain man” is, in fact, a Korean man stranded in Japan after the end of World War II who saves the titular “disappearing girl” Yukiko from a gang of children pelting her with rocks. Through their relationship, Shirato unpacks the foreignness latent in the yama otoko figure as well as folklore studies’ ties to fascism at a moment in postwar Japan when many would rather simply forget. Moreover, in choosing to tell this story in a comic “for girls” (i.e. shōjo manga), Shirato solicits a form of solidarity between oppressed demographics (women and non-Japanese) that both imperial and “democratic” Japan sought to keep down.
