水木 しげる
Born 1922
The creator of GeGeGe no Kitarō, war veteran and historian in comics, who made yokai a fixture of Japanese popular culture. The name reduces to 5 — the turn.
5Five — change. That is the reduction of this name, and the shelf it is read from.
Shigeru Mizuki was born in 1922 and grew up in Sakaiminato, Tottori Prefecture, where an elderly neighbour told him the folk tales and ghost stories that shaped his work. Drafted in the Second World War, he was sent to New Britain in Papua New Guinea, where he lost his left arm in an air raid. After the war he painted kamishibai and drew for the rental-book market before reaching magazines in the 1960s.
GeGeGe no Kitarō, developed from the rental-book Hakaba Kitarō, became a hit in Weekly Shōnen Magazine and on television from 1968 onward. Through it and his illustrated encyclopaedias, Mizuki gave definitive visual form to hundreds of yokai.
His other major body of work is about the war. Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths draws on his own unit's experience of being ordered to a suicidal charge, and Showa: A History of Japan interweaves his life with the history of the period. These books are among the most important first-hand accounts of the war in comics.
His memoir of childhood, NonNonBâ, won the prize for best album at Angoulême in 2007, and the English edition of Showa won an Eisner Award. He died in 2015. In Sakaiminato a street lined with bronze statues of his yokai draws visitors from across Japan.
The arithmetic is unremarkable and worth doing anyway: 77 across 2 words, reducing to 5. The weight sits in “Shigeru”, which carries 42 on its own and reduces to 6.
What the 5 brings is change. The reference files it as a turn. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 5's restlessness and hunger for change.
Heart's Desire 11, Personality 3: vision underneath, expression on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
人格 core is 5, 総格 total is 15, a 6 and born is 1922, a 5. That the 5 turns up in 人格 core and born as well as in the letters is the sort of coincidence this reference collects rather than explains.
The 5 asks you to ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. The other entries that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.