The Birth of Kitarō (鬼太郎の誕生 Kitarō no Tanjō) is a GeGeGe no Kitarō story published as a chapter of the Shonen Magazine run.
Characters[]
Plot[]
One night, a man named Mizuki wakes up when he hears a knock on his door. He asks who is there and a voice answers explaining that they have moved into the temple next door. When Mizuki goes to the door, all he finds is a gift box on the ground. Inside the gift box is a single eyeball which he buries in disgust.
The next morning, Mizuki tells his mother of the incident before going to his job at a blood bank. At work he is asked by his boss to investigate a patient who has received ghost blood. When he looks at the hospital records, he discovers the blood is listed as coming from someone living at his home address. He figures the cuprit must be his mysterious new neighbors and, after hearing from his mother that they wouldn't answer the door when she went to meet them, he decides to question them.
Later that night, Mizuki sees a hitodama out the window and follows it to the run down and empty looking temple. He is horrified to find a ghoulish looking woman who invites him to sit down and offers him some frog eyes to eat. He tries to run in terror but is stopped by a heavily bandaged and decaying man, the woman's husband, who asks Mizuki to hear their story.
They tell him how they are from the Ghost Tribe, a family of yōkai, and how their kind was once the dominant species on the planet. But after the human race appeared and started taking over, the yōkai gradually retreated into the darkness, hiding their existence and only coming out at night. Humans mistook them for monsters and hunted them down until only Mizuki's neighbors remained. But when the husband contracted an incurable disease, they came to the human world to try and treat him, with the wife selling her blood for income.
When Mizuki threatens to turn them in, the wife reveals she is three months pregnant and asks him to hold off long enough for their child to be born, otherwise humans will come to kill them. Mizuki reluctantly agrees, but when he checks on them six months later they've both died.
Mizuki buries the couple out of pity, and when he returns to the graveyard three nights later, their child has been born and crawled out from the grave. Afraid of the misfortune a ghost child will bring, Mizuki tries to kill the baby. He can't go through, however, and instead leaves him in the graveyard.
The husband comes back to life when his eyeball, his last bit of living tissue, falls out of it's socket and grows a tiny body. The Medama-Oyaji, or eyeball father, hurries to the graveyard to find his son. He leads the boy, Kitarō, back to Mizuki's house, where Mizuki has a change of heart. Telling his mother that the child was left on their doorstep, he decides to take care of Kitarō. Medama-Oyaji, despite being stepped on by a delivery boy, swears to watch over his son no matter what.
Six years pass and Kitarō, because of his ghoulish face, is mocked and feared by the people around him. Mizuki's mother finds the boy creepy and complains to her son that Kitarō has been sneaking out at nights. That night, Medama-Oyaji sneaks into Kitarō's room and they head to the graveyard. Mizuki follows, only to lose them along the way, finding only Kitarō's geta sandals on the ground. When Mizuki confronts Kitarō the next day, Kitarō admits that he has been going to Hell to play with other yōkai. Mizuki forbids him from going back to the graveyard, telling him he'll have to leave the house if he ever does.
That night, Medama-Oyaji comes back to Kitarō's room and suggests leaving anyway, since they'll have more freedom that way. The story ends with Kitarō and Medama-Oyaji beginning an aimless journey.
Trivia[]
- This story is a remake of rental manga story Ghost Family.
- As with some other remakes of the rental manga, like The Nekoya Siblings and Odoro-Odoro vs. Vampire, this version was never adapted for anime.