Takeshita Demons
(Book #1)
by Cristy Burne
Frances Lincoln, 2010
128 Pages
Middle Grade (8-12 and up)
Miku moves to London from her home in Japan, which had been a house built with an upside down pillar, which pretty much guarantees a haunting. But her Baba had lived with her back then and had taught her about yokai and magical protections. That house had a zashiki-warashi ghost within its walls that had watched over the family. Now, her mother refuses to even let her hang cedar leaves over the doorway.
One day someone who isn’t there comes knocking, and a strong, terrifying breeze blows in.
Miku suddenly has a new teacher at school, Mrs. Okuda, a woman straight from Japan who addresses her in proper Japanese, as Takeshita Miku. The new teacher has a strange tattoo that runs around her neck like jewelry. Miku believes her to be a nukekubi, a dangerous demon that can remove its head to devour children. Could she have followed Miku’s family all the way from Japan?
Miku invites her best friend Cait O’Neil for a sleepover one night when the snow gets heavy. (I guess they just aren’t equipped to handle a Japanese snowstorm in London. Of course, having grown up in upstate New York myself, I chortle in their general direction.) There is a knock at the door, and there stands Cait’s father. Who is also on the phone in the next room… Miku knows it is a noppera-bo, a mostly harmless spirit, but soon after, Miku’s little brother Kazu goes missing. The girls know that it must be the work of their new teacher.
They go to the school in search of the yokai’s body, but they discover the halls flooded from a leak in the pipes. Swishing through the water comes a woman with the body of a huge snake, a water spirit called a nure-onna. She says that the snowstorm was caused by yet another demon, a yuki-onna, a lady of the snow. Surrounded by yokai spirit demons, how can the two girls hope to rescue Kazu?
The flying head shot again in our direction, a black comet through the white sky. This time it slammed so hard into the glass that the whole window shuddered. When it whirled away for another attack, it left a smear of red blood on the glass.
Miku learns that her grandmother had been a woman respected by the spirit world, and that indeed, she and her family had become a target once she left the house in Japan and was no longer guarded by the ghost her family endearingly called Zashiko.
Demon-fighting is in the Takeshita blood, it turns out. So after this adventure, Miku is assured to have more encounters with demons, ghosts, and the supernatural.
It’s hard to find this series in the US, as it did not have a large distribution. It’s too bad, because it’s really fun! This series is a must-read! It’s written at a younger middle-grade level, like Preller’s Scary Tales, so his fans would enjoy these books. Any enthusiast of Japanese culture’s supernatural side, yokai or kaiju, especially fans of Hayao Miyazaki, will likewise be enamored of Burne’s writing.
