Mizuki Shigeru was an artist, historian and folklorist perhaps best known for ‘GeGeGe no Kitarō’ (Spooky Kitarō), a manga and anime series he created in the 1960s. Mizuki’s work built on that of earlier artists including Toriyama Sekien (1712–88), Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797–1861) and Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858). In 2008, he reimagined Hiroshige’s famous 1833–34 series ‘Fifty-three stations of the Tōkaidō’ (the east-west route between Edo, now Tokyo, and Kyoto) as the ‘Fifty-three stations of the Yōkaido’, with yōkai inserted into every scene.

'Odawara' includes a self portrait of the artist as a bespectacled water-dwelling kappa yōkai.