Greetings yokai lovers!
Today’s yokai painting is the last one of 2018. Winter vacation starts next week, and I’m looking forward to a fun Oshogatsu, the Japanese New Year. It’s my favorite Japanese holiday (nothing will take the crown away from Halloween as my favorite holiday of the year).
I’m just hinting a bit at Christmas with this painting. The snowflakes on the bag and the red kimono reminiscent of Santa’s suit are as far as I can safely go to put “outside” things into a yokai illustration. However, the badger carrying a huge sack full of stuff down a hallway at night is so Santa-like that I just couldn’t resist!
During winter vacation I will be planning a few things for 2019. In addition to continuing with new yokai for yokai.com (and future books), I have been longing to try a more narrative style of storytelling. It’s one thing to talk about yokai, but one thing I keep getting requests for is more and longer yokai stories. So, I am planning to work on a few short tales in comic form. It’s still too early to comment on what that will look like or where it will go, but I will share the progress during 2019 here alongside the standard yokai profiles.
Anyway, I would like to thank everyone for your generous support in 2018, and I hope you’ll stay with me for 2019 as well. And I wish every one a very happy holiday season!
– Matt
Fukuro mujina
http://yokai.com/fukuromujina/
袋狢
ふくろむじな
TRANSLATION: bag badger
HABITAT: human-inhabited areas
APPEARANCE: Fukuro mujina look like mujina (badgers; however this word sometimes refers to tanuki as well) dressed in human clothes and make up resembling ancient noblewomen. A very large sack is slung over their shoulder.
ORIGINS: Mujina are known to be tricksters, dressing up in various human costumes and masquerading as people. However, because this yōkai originally appears in a collection of tsukumogami, it is likely that fukuro mujina are actually haunted bags which take on the appearance of mujina, rather than mujina pretending to be humans.
Fukuro mujina was invented by Toriyama Sekien and appears in his Hyakki tsurezure bukuro, however it was based on illustrations from much older yōkai picture scrolls. Sekien inserts a pun into his description of the fukuro mujina, referring to an old proverb: “to price a badger in a hole.” The meaning of this idiom is that it is difficult to estimate the value of something you do not yet possess. It is similar to the English phrase “to count your chickens before they are hatched.”
Kunitanuki
http://yokai.com/kinutanuki/
絹狸
きぬたぬき
TRANSLATION: silk tanuki
HABITAT: human-inhabited areas
APPEARANCE: Kinutanuki are silk products which have transformed into tsukumogami. They sprout heads, feet, and tails which resemble those of tanuki.
ORIGINS: Toriyama Sekien invented kinutanuki for his book Hyakki tsurezure bukuro. While tanuki are famous for their unmatched ability to shape shift into various objects, because this appears in a book of tsukumogami, it is unclear if kinutanuki are tanuki disguised as silk, or simply pieces of silk which have grown a soul and taken on the form of tanuki.
The name kinutanuki contained a number of puns. Traditionally, when silk was made it was taken to a river and beaten with a wooden board called a kinuta to soften it. Tanuki are famous for beating their bellies like drums. The name kinutanuki is to be a pun connecting this beating action, and literally combining the words kinuta and tanuki.
On top of that, Sekien’s description references a famous type of Japanese silk known as Hachijō silk. Written with different kanji, hachijō also means “eight tatami mats.” According to folklore, tanuki possess the ability to enlarge their scrotums up to eight tatami mats in size, and morph them into various shapes. This wordplay doubles down on the association of silk with tanuki.