In this world, there are mysterious spiritual beings called ayakashi. Several of them look after a young girl named Yoshino, who was abandoned at a local shrine, and life there is anything but boring. There are scuffles between cursed dolls, and even a ghost who's training to become a ninja! But if Yoshino is intent on being the shrine's next priestess, she'll have to accept that not all ayakashi are so harmless. What valuable and bittersweet lessons about life and loss will her quirky spirit friends teach her?

Ayakashi à la Mode has a story by Ballad Kitaguni and art by Nyum, based on works by Yasuda Gensho. English translation is done by Cal Hampton. Published by Yen On (September 22, 2026).

Rebecca Silverman
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Narratives happen in large chunks of time, moving smoothly from one event to the next with small moments in between. Ayakashi à la Mode is a book made up only of those small moments. It's an interesting approach to take, one made possible in part by the fact that this book grew out of a series of animated shorts. If I'm understanding the creator's note correctly (a toss-up, since I have a cold), these interconnected short stories all take place in-between them. Essentially, these are those small moments left out of the original narrative.

That makes this a bit of a struggle in some ways. While we do get who all the characters are and how they fit together – Yoshino is a child taken in by the shrine of a fox deity, Mamiko is the priestess, and Kaede and Katherine are cursed dolls living at the shrine – there's a sense that we're missing a lot of information. Yes, we get bits and pieces filled in, as each story does “remind” readers of what happened before them, but there's still that feeling of lacking serious information. It's one thing to be told that in-between chapters Mamiko fought an evil ayakashi and lost an arm and must now live covered in enspelled bandages; it's another to actually experience it and its impact on all of the characters. We get the aftermath rather than the main story, and that's uniquely frustrating as a reader.

Still, the book is fascinating. The careful way it builds its world and moves through time is a large part of what makes it work – we meet Yoshino as a very little girl, and by the end of the novel she's graduating high school. Her relationships with the fading town she lives in and the people and ayakashi around her grow and develop, and even if we're not there to see them, there's a clear sense of life going on as usual when we're not there to see it. People come, go, grow up, grow old, and pass away, and we're privy to the aftermath and how it affects Yoshino emotionally. This is best shown in the final story in the volume (not counting the epilogue), where the way life changes with each new turn of the cycle is most beautifully shown. It's bittersweet in the right way, and if the other stories don't quite live up to that, I'd say it's because they're building to the final story's moment.

Although it's a bit reductive, the easiest way to quantify this book is to say that when it's good, it's good…and when it's not, it's kind of dull. But then, life is an uneven series of ups and downs, so perhaps that's simply what Ayakashi à la Mode is trying to emulate.

Erica Friedman
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If you're a fan of “ayakashi, the various mysterious, mystical, and supernatural forces in Japanese history, and you know a young child who loves spooky things, or would like them to, Ayakashi à la Mode is a great place to begin. We begin with the spirits, gods, and other beings living at a shrine in a small city. The beings are taking care of Yoshino, a young human girl who was left behind at the shrine, possibly because her spiritual energy was high and, as a child, she could not control it.

The god of the shrine, Uka, is an ancient fox spirit. She is joined by two possessed dolls who are always bickering. Other ayakashi, good and bad, make appearances, plus a random witch, and of course a scolding shrine maiden who must be the adult for everyone and everything in the room.

Yoshino, the human child, is quite likable, and we're sympathetic even when she really doesn't quite understand that not all ayakashi are friends. Interestingly, ayakashi in the west of Japan are considered any yokai above water, which makes the giant crab chapter a bit odd. But then, who really needs an excuse to have a chapter about a giant monster crab, really?

While the humor tends towards endless bickering, the conflicts between humans and different kinds of inhuman are easy to understand, the scares are relatively gentle, consequences are silly rather than serious, which makes Ayakashi à la Mode a relatively gentle introduction to Japanese supernatural beings who occupy space in the world of humans and how they are we learn to live together, at least most of the time.