Today’s yokai isn’t really an animal, but it’s similar to one, as you can see. We’re actually going to look at a few tsukumogami, or artifact spirits, which are one of the most populous and popular types of yokai out there. It seems everyone loves them, and it’s not hard to see why: they are cute and silly and very weird!

In fact, tsukumogami were some of the earliest yokai ever invented. The tradition of drawing yokai scrolls began in the Muromachi period (14th-16th centuries), and quickly became quite popular. Prior to then, most stories of the strange and supernatural dealt with onryou and oni rather than yokai.

These yokai scrolls depicted almost entirely tsukumogami, with just a few other grotesque and bizarre creatures, though back then the creatures were not named. Most of them were recognizable, and they give us a good deal of insight into the types of household objects used by people in everyday life 500+ years ago, so they are quite valuable works of art. Rather than depicting aristocratic life or rich pastoral and nature scenes like the paintings of earlier periods, these yokai scrolls focused on ordinary people and ordinary things.

Before I get too far off on an art history rant, I’ll go back to the picture at hand. This yokai, like most, was not labled in its first scroll appearances, but it appears in some of the earliest yokai scrolls. Its name appears on much later scrolls, but it was not hard to guess what the original artist probably intended it to be. The cylindrical bells that hang above shrines are often called waniguchi, or “alligator mouths” because of their shape—they look like the head of some lizard-like creature. Looking at these bells, it’s almost as if they are just asking for an artist to add a scaly body and turn it into a monster!

Click on the image or here to visit yokai.com and learn more about this yokai and many others!