The Book of Yokai

started this book with a discussion of how yōkai emerge as people grapple with mysterious experiences, putting names and faces on occurrences or feelings that are otherwise indescribable. But from at least Sekien’s time onward, we see a complementary process of creation occurring. Just like the yuru-kyara devised all over Japan today, many of the yōkai Sekien invented did not come into being through attempts to describe mysterious phenomena. Rather they were drawn from relevant elements and existing motifs and put together in an interesting and often ingenious fashion. I am not saying that new yōkai characters do not serve a function; I am only noting that their inception is different and, in a sense, more playful. It derives not from the challenge of grappling with the incomprehensible in the world around us but from the challenge of making something new and sending it out into that world.

is also clear that even though yōkai may be strange and interstitial, they are not always scary: they are also about play, or the “ludic mode.” In fact yōkai are often produced through playfulness. Many of Sekien’s yōkai, for example, were consciously created from wordplay, and his images are full of visual puns. (Because he puts his newly invented yōkai in an encyclopedic format, however, they seem as if they have been around for a very long time.)

addition to the mass producers of these widely distributed goods, there is also an overlapping group of people who participate in the production of yōkai items. These individuals grew up with Mizuki’s images and now Kyōgoku’s novels; not satisfied with simply consuming, however, they have entered the fray as independent producers themselves. Some are yōkai otaku, profoundly inspired by manga and anime and possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of yōkai. Others are more enamored with older or localized yōkai manifestations, and have traveled (or read) widely in search of yōkai folklore. I call this the vernacular node, to stress its informal, unof

the same time, yōkai always also raise abstract questions. In the final pages of this chapter, I further develop some of the ideas we have seen throughout and explore more conceptual ways that yōkai reflect and inform our cognitive and social structures. Of course, there is no grand unified theory of yōkai, but thinking about them in the abstract can inspire theoretical and philosophical speculation about the ways we experience and make sense of the world. And the abstract and the concrete, the theory and the practice, are never far apart.

I have suggested from the outset, Japanese yōkai are specific to Japan—that is, they are molded by the particular history and culture of the group of islands that is now called “Nihon” (Japan). To be sure, then, yōkai do tell us something about the “Japanese” experience, but they also tell us a lot more: about how people understand their world, about artistic and narrative expression, about the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, about science and religion, and on and on. Komatsu may have first come across what he calls “mystic thinking” in Japanese texts, but as the history of monsters and the supernatural in other countries also reminds us, su

Kitarō is frequently accompanied by another character, Medama-oyaji (Papa Eyeball), a disembodied eyeball with arms, legs, and squeaky voice (even though he has no mouth), who represents the remains of Kitarō’s dead father and is often pictured perched on Kitarō’s head or shoulder.

Hearn led a complex life. He was born in 1850 on the Greek island of Lafkada (hence the name), the second child of a passionate affair between an Irish officer in the British Army and a local Greek woman. Several months later, his father was transferred to the West Indies, and his mother took baby Patrick Lafcadio Hearn to Ireland.

word hyaku-monogatari literally means “one hundred stories,” but the number one hundred was not necessarily taken literally. In fact, most hyaku-monogatari collections include fewer than a hundred tales. In one sense, the implication was simply that this was a very large number.

Susa-no-O, Dragon Slayer
Other than wooden slips called mokkan, seals, and similar fragments of writing, the earliest known texts in Japan are the mythohistorical Kojiki (712) and Nihonshoki (720).1 Although the word yōkai itself does not appear in these works, they do include some terrifying and monstrous creatures—as well as people, or gods, who subdue them. Perhaps the most famous is a deity named Susa-no-O, the mischievous younger brother of the sun goddess, Amaterasu.

this is to say that by exploring yōkai we challenge ourselves to ponder issues of belief, both personal and cultural, as well as metaphysical and phenomenological questions about the ways we experience and perceive our lives. Although belief in the supernatural is often debunked as irrational or unscientific, for example, we can actually consider the processes through which yōkai are created to be, in a sense, rational. The unknown, the feared, those things that overwhelm us with anxiety, are carefully identified, given form, and labeled. Only then can we grapple with them.