It’s been a very busy three-day weekend! I barely had time to post Saturday and Sunday’s yokai, and today I was busy all day long and wasn’t able to paint anything new. Fortunately, I was prepared for this. Every year I expect that there will be a couple of days where I’m not able to do a whole painting and translation, and so I prepare a secret stash of finished yokai in September that I can use to fill in the gaps. Today I’m dipping into my secret yokai stash.

Funny enough, today’s yokai fits right in with the ones we’ve been looking at recently. It’s not from the Matsui Bunko Hyakki yagyo emaki, however it is a rare yokai and it doesn’t have much in the way of a story to it. Today’s yokai came from a very old book debunking the yokai sideshows that were popular around the country. It exposed “mummified” kappa as the taxidermy creations that they were, and documented similar misemono (sideshow attractions) that were springing up across the country during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This book doesn’t quite debunk this yokai, but it does describe the creature and the reports of the local fishermen who claimed to have captured it. Click below to visit yokai.com and find out the whole story!

Hosogyo

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