There’s just a week left of daily yokai, and I wanted to let all the readers know of an upcoming event. This Wednesday the 28th, I will be giving a talk at 3pm at Villanova University. The topic is yokai and Japanese ghosts. Anyone in the area, please come on down to Villanova and show your support for yokai! For more information, visit Villanova’s event calendar here.

I will also have copies of both of my books available, as well as postcards and bookmarks featuring yokai. I will be signing the books with my special brush pen which I got at the Abe no Seimei Shrine in Kyoto—the perfect pen to sign a yokai book with!

If you already bought the books, bring them in and I will sign them. Or, you can buy them there and I will sign them for you.

Okay, on to today’s yokai!

Haka no hi is one of those yokai for which almost no information at all exists. I’ve mentioned a number of times on my blog and in my talks how for most yokai, all that exists is a short tale of a few sentences. And then there are yokai even shorter than that—for which all that exists is a single illustration or a one sentence description; not even a story. Haka no hi is one of these super minimalistic yokai.

This yokai was introduced by Toriyama Sekien and given an illustration with just the description of what it does. Very minimal. No legends, no references, nothing. It’s very likely he invented it just to pad his books. However, that said, it is not entirely without folklore. I actually met some priests in Japan who told me that late at night they saw mysterious fires coming from underneath the graves in their temples. They had a more (pseudo)scientific explanation—they explained it off as gases escaping the decaying bones in the graves causing some phantom illumination. But whatever the explanation is, many people report claiming some kind of mysterious phosphorescence around graveyards. So even though there are no ghost tales about it, it is not a totally unknown phenomenon, and it is very much a weird mystery. And that is the essence of yokai.

Click below to read the (very short) entry on yokai.com!