Japanese Yokai: The Supernatural Creatures and Spirits of Japan

For most of Japan's history, the dark was crowded. A fox on the road might be a woman by morning. The water in the dish on a kappa's head held its life. A neglected tool, a hundred years old, could open an eye and bear a grudge. These are the yōkai: the demons, ghosts, and spirits that Japan set at the edge of every mountain, every river, and every lonely house. They were how a people explained what it could not: a drowning, a fever, a madness, a sound in an empty room. They were believed in enough to keep a child from the water and a traveller off the mountain after dark. Japanese Yōkai follows them across sixteen chapters, from the horned oni of the Buddhist hells and the vengeful dead, through the shape-shifting foxes and cats, the water-imps and the mountain goblins, and the spirits that wake in worn-out household tools, to the local creatures each village kept as its own. It tells where they came from, what they were made to explain, and why, after a century of being explained away, they returned to fill the manga, the video games, and the horror films of modern Japan. The old chronicles named them, the Edo print-makers drew them, and the folklorists wrote the rest down before they were lost. This is the whole of that world in one account: the creatures that have haunted the Japanese imagination for more than a thousand years, and haunt it still.