<p><i><b>Meet one of Japan's most popular characters of all time-Kitaro, the One-Eyed Monster Boy</b></i><br><i><b></b></i><br><i><b></b>The Birth of Kitaro</i> collects seven of Shigeru Mizuki's early, and beloved, Kitaro stories, making them available for the first time in English, in an all-new, kid-friendly format. These stories are from the golden era of the late 1960s, when Gegege no Kitaro truly hit its stride as an all-ages supernatural series. Mizuki's Kitaro stories are both timelessly relevant and undeniably influential, inspiring a decades-long boom in stories about yokai, Japanese ghosts, and monsters.</p><p>&quot;Kitaro's Birthday&quot; reveals the origin story of the half-yokai boy Kitaro and his tiny eyeball father, Medama Oyaji. &quot;Neko Musume versus Nezumi Otoko&quot; is the first of Mizuki's stories to feature the popular recurring character Neko Musume, a little girl who transforms into a cat when she gets angry or hungry. Other stories in <i>The Birth of Kitaro</i>draw heavily from Japanese folklore, with Kitaro taking on legendary Japanese yokai like the Nopperabo and Makura Gaeshi, and fighting the monstrous recurring villain Gyuki.</p><p>With more than 150 pages of spooky and often funny comics about the titular half-yokai boy,<i>The Birth of Kitaro</i> is the perfect introduction to the award-winning author Mizuki's most popular series, seminal comics that have won the hearts of Japanese children and adults for more than half a century.</p>