YO-KAI WATCH, Vol. 7

Noriyuki Konishi is a Japanese manga artist who has established a substantial career in children's manga — comics aimed at elementary school age readers — through work on both original properties and franchise adaptations. He is best known internationally for his long-running work on the Yo-kai Watch manga, which he began in 2013 alongside the launch of Level-5's video game franchise and which played a significant role in building the Yo-kai Watch multimedia phenomenon into one of the most commercially successful children's properties in Japan during the mid-2010s.

Yo-kai Watch, as a franchise, posits a world in which Yo-kai — supernatural beings from Japanese folklore, typically mischievous or troublesome rather than actively malevolent — are invisible to ordinary humans but can be detected and befriended using a special device called the Yo-kai Watch. Konishi's manga adaptation follows the young boy Keita Amano (Nathan Adams in the international version) and his Yo-kai companion Whisper as they encounter and befriend various Yo-kai, whose influence on human behaviour provides most of the series' comedy.

Konishi's skill in this context is the ability to make the franchise's extensive roster of creature designs legible and appealing in black-and-white manga format, and to find comedic storytelling approaches that work for young readers without condescending to them. The manga is genuinely funny in ways that operate across age groups, with the situational comedy of Yo-kai-induced behaviour providing material that children and accompanying adults can both appreciate.

Before Yo-kai Watch, Konishi worked on Shinpei-kun and other original children's manga series, and has continued to produce children's manga alongside the franchise work. His career represents an important strand of manga production that often receives less critical attention than manga aimed at older audiences but that shapes the reading habits and cultural relationship to comics of an entire generation of young readers.