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Preface

The yokai are the spookiest Japanese monsters you’ve never heard of, and it’s high time they got their due.

妖怪

Written with the Japanese characters for “otherworldly” and “weird,” the word “yokai” has typically been translated in a great many ways, from “demon” to “ghost” to “goblin” to “spectre”—all of which are about as imprecise and un-evocative as translating “samurai” as “Japanese warrior,” or “sushi” as “raw fish on rice.” Yokai are yokai.

The yokai in this survival guide are mythical, supernatural creatures that have populated generations of Japanese fairy tales and folk stories. They can be seen in museums worldwide on scrolls, screens, woodblock prints, and other traditional forms of Japanese art, menacing hapless citizens or being skewered by swashbuckling samurai. They are the things that go bump in Japan’s night, the faces behind inexplicable phenomena, the personalities behind the strange hands that fate often deals us. They represent the attempts of the fertile human imagination to impose meaning and rationality on a chaotic, unpredictable, often difficult-to-explain world. This is essentially what the yokai are: superstitions with personalities.

For centuries they have stalked the mountains, forests, fields, rivers, and coastlines of Japan. Some are animal-like, some are human-like. Others are inanimate objects that have taken uncanny sentient form. Some are personifications of natural phenomena. And still others are obviously tongue-in-cheek flights of fancy—physical incarnations of jokes, puns, or idioms. Some are considered helpful. Many are mischievous. And more than a few are thought to be very, very dangerous. They are Japan’s bogeymen, and once the lights go out, they are always there.

The term yokai wasn’t always as widely used to describe these creatures as it is today. Until the end of the seventeenth century, they were more commonly referred to as mononoke (ghosts) or bakemono (monsters). Many were originally of foreign provenance, having come to Japan via Chinese religious and academic texts. Others were purely native creations.

The single most famous collection of yokai illustrations can be found in artist Sekien Toriyama’s 1776 satire Gazu Hyakki Yako, or the “Illustrated Demons’ Night Parade.” It featured descriptions of more than fifty yokai, some rooted in tradition, but many crafted by Sekien himself to poke fun at various social conventions. Its success led to a series of sequels and heralded a growing public interest in the mysterious creatures.

The real heyday of yokai was in the early to mid-1800s, from the end of what is known as the Edo period through the Meiji era, just before Japan re-opened to the West and began modernizing. Raised in the fertile soil of Japan’s polytheistic, animistic culture, polished by generations of rural storytellers and eventually given form by urban artists and illustrators, the folktale creatures enchanted people of the day. They quickly emerged as popular subjects for the burgeoning mass media, which at the time included books, woodblock prints, scrolls, and public storytelling. Adults perused tabloid publications brimming with lurid descriptions of purported real-life yokai encounters, while children collected yokai karuta (game cards) in a trend that is startlingly evocative of the Pokemon fad that swept the world in the late twentieth century.

Yet for all the fascination and even terror they induced in generations of Japanese, the strange creatures proved no match at first for the inexorable march of progress. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese philosopher and university professor Dr. Enryo Inoue saw the widespread belief in yokai as such a threat to modernization that he established yokaigaku—“yokai-ology”—a systematic, science-based approach to cataloging and debunking purported yokai sightings. Slowly but surely, yokai began to disappear from the public consciousness around the same time that Japan began to industrialize and institute a formal educational system. (Ironically, Inoue’s painstakingly collected data is a treasure trove for those interested in yokai today.)

For a while it seemed as if this complex bunch of bogeymen, some of them strong and voracious enough to rip a man’s entrails out by hand, were fragile enough to be driven away by the advent of electricity, flush toilets, and the trappings of an industrial society.

But yokai never die—they just fade away until the moment suits their return. While the lights may never truly go out in modern Japanese cities, the yokai never stopped prowling the pages of Japanese literature.

It was a foreigner who rekindled the Japanese love affair with yokai: Lafcadio Hearn, the eccentric journalist who published in English under his given name and in Japanese under the name Yakumo Koizumi. His compilations of Japanese legends, produced with the assistance of his wife and interpreter, Setsuko, include In Ghostly Japan (1899) and Kwaidan (1903). When translated back into Japanese, they influenced a new generation of local folklore scholars.

Kunio Yanagita’s Tono Monogatari (“Tales of Tono”), a collection of folktales and yokai stories from the northern reaches of Japan, proved tremendously popular on its publication in 1912, and remains in print even today. Comic books featuring yokai characters sparked another fad for things yokai in the 1960s, most notably artist Shigeru Mizuki’s hit series Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro. Many of Mizuki’s characters are based on the same folktales and classic art that were consulted for this book.

Children raised on this fearsome fare grew into adults that remained fascinated with the creatures. Yokai-like characters appear in several of the novels written by bestselling Japanese author Haruki Murakami, including the mysterious Sheep Man from A Wild Sheep Chase and the yamikuro (translated as “Infra-Nocturnal Kappa” in the English edition) that infest the Tokyo sewer system in Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The internationally acclaimed films of director Hayao Miyazaki feature abundant yokai-related imagery—including Spirited Away, The Princess Mononoke, Pom Poko, and even My Neighbor Totoro, the eponymous main character of which could be considered a yokai of sorts. And hundreds—perhaps thousands—of yokai took the stage in director Takashi Miike’s 2005 film Yokai Daisenso (The Great Yokai War). Yokai may not have the hold over the public consciousness that they once enjoyed, but they continue to subtly inform the aesthetic rhythms that pulse beneath the surface of Japanese pop culture.

Learn about yokai and you will understand a critical piece of the puzzle that Japanese culture often presents to outsiders.

That’s where this book comes into play. Yokai Attack! is your one-stop guide to understanding Japan’s traditional creepy-crawlies. Yokai are ethereal sorts of beings, nearly always encountered at night, so everyone has their own take on how they might look in real life and what sorts of characteristics they might have. This book represents an attempt to reconcile descriptions from a variety of sources, including but not limited to individual accounts of encounters, Japanese vintage woodblock prints, and microfilms of vintage illustrations stored in the National Diet Library in Tokyo.

All-new illustrations, created by the talented Tatsuya Morino, detail the potential appearance of each yokai. In many cases, they’re portrayed in a traditional manner; in others, we decided to have some fun exploring how they might look in more modern settings. Alongside each illustration is a series of “data points,” allowing you to take in key characteristics at a glance. And most importantly, we’ve provided information about how to survive meetings with these strange creatures—handy for any potential close encounters.

A quick word about what this book is not. It is not intended as an authoritative last word on the origins or purported behavior of these creatures. It is a collection of conventional wisdom (perhaps “uncanny wisdom” would be a better term?) concerning the yokai—the sorts of things the average Japanese individual might know about them. Think of it as a springboard for further exploration on your own, and a leg up to understanding the many references and allusions to yokai that appear in modern Japanese films, literature, and even everyday speech.

In traditional Japanese “yokai-ology,” the creatures are classified by where they generally appear. Typical habitats include in and around houses (both functional and abandoned), mountains, forests, Buddhist temples, the banks of lakes or rivers, coastal waters, and such. But to make things easier for the first-time reader who isn’t as intimately familiar with these traditional settings, here we group a small selection of the most famous and visually appealing yokai by personality. Ferocious Fiends are the sorts of creatures you wouldn’t want to encounter in a dark alley (or a bright one, for that matter). Gruesome Gourmets are yokai with peculiar eating habits. Annoying Neighbors are the sorts of things you pray never move in next door. The Sexy and Slimy enchant their prey with slithery svelteness or carnal charms. And The Wimps are just what their name implies: monsters who are probably more afraid of you than you are of them.

So forget Godzilla. Forget the giant beasties karate-chopped into oblivion by endless incarnations of Ultraman, Kamen Rider, and the Power Rangers. Forget the Pocket Monsters. Forget Sadako from The Ring and that creepy all-white kid from The Grudge. Forget everything you know about Japanese tales of terror.

If you want to survive an encounter with a member of Japan’s most fearsome and fascinating bunch of monsters, you’ve got some reading to do.

—Hiroko Yoda & Matt Alt

Tokyo

2012