Comics are fertile ground for folklore. Many of its heroes derive from myths and tall-tales. Reinterpretation of those tales is what most fans crave as the originals have become so ingratiated into popular culture’s mythical zeitgeist; we need our expectations toyed with to see the story in a more interesting light. If there’s an illustrator that I can trust with the reinterpretation of various Japanese folktales, it’s Ken Niimura in his recent collection: Never Open It: The Taboo Trilogy. 

The trilogy of stories Niimura chose entail the idea of rules and what happens when those are broken. In the titular story, based on Urashima Tarō, a young man saves a turtle from being beaten by children. The turtle, in his gratitude, invites him to an underwater palace. Upon becoming homesick, the young man’s given a small sealed box with two instructions: should he wish to return to this palace, he only needs to place the box in the water, and to never open the box itself under any circumstances.

The second story, “Empty,” based on Ikkyu-san, concerns a monk and a pot of honey that he doesn’t want apprentices to eat, so he tells them that the pot is filled with poison. Curiosity drives the apprentices to open the pot and empty it of its honey. Fearing the monk’s retribution, they come up with a story to put them back in his good graces.

The final piece, “The Promise,” based on The Crane Wife, tells us the story of Yohio and the crane that he rescues from hunters and the woman who appears shortly after who promises to reward Yohio with a bolt of cloth on the condition that he cannot witness her weaving. 

Niimura’s eye offers expansion with his interpretations. While he does break down the basics of these tales—the portions most familiar to readers of Japanese folktales or Decemberists fans—he works to give us another dimension to them entirely. In “Never Open It,” the young man, Taro, meets an older man who was also given the box from the undersea palace. This man opened it and was transformed into the old man we would have been left with had Niimura strictly followed the original story. But he instead tilts the perspective. We get to see the consequences of the original story’s actions while being given the opportunity to get revenge for a trick played on curious. Similar in “The Promise” in how Yohio isn’t the one to witness the woman transforming into a crane to weave her cloth, but still must deal with the consequences of someone else’s actions that doom their entire town.

Like Henshin a few years prior, Never Open It plays with our expectations. From a simple twist on our expectations or a complete reinterpretation, he’s able to lead us down a road that looks familiar enough before showing us something we couldn’t have imagined possible within the confines of our original assumptions. But then that playfulness with stories that are so familiar is what keeps them fresh for even longer. 

Get excited. Get curious.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.