Those of you who have been following my Facebook page since the winter probably have seen a number of these photos before, as I have been sharing them as I have been painting them. However, this is the first time you’ve seen them with the accompanying text of course!

Today’s yokai was a request from a fan. It sticks out in my mind because last winter when I visited Japan to do some yokai research I saw a lot of tsubaki trees. I was visiting Matsue, the small town in Shimane where the immortal Koizumi Yakumo (aka Lafcadio Hearn) made his home. I was tracing one of his favorite routes, down a street to a small, secluded Inari shrine which he used to visit and which supposedly inspired one or two of his stories, when I noticed the beautiful flowers all along the road. Their name stuck out at me: tsubaki. Then I realized, isn’t there a tsubaki yokai??? Yes of course! Furutsubaki no rei, or the ghost of the old tsubaki tree!

I went home and researched that yokai, but the blossoms of those trees, which bloom in the winter and are thus called the winter rose, still stand out in my memory. I guess it’s fate that I should be inspired about yokai stories on the same road that Lafcadio Hearn walked down to receive inspiration about yokai stories some 100 years ago!

Anyway, here is today’s yokai: