Hello readers and yokai lovers!

It’s been nearly a year since I’ve posted here, as I’ve been more active on various social media sites, Patreon, and yokai.com these days. This site, however, still remains the faithful home of A-Yokai-A-Day, even if that’s makes October the only month I post regularly. With the way social media is fragmenting further and further these days, I miss the old days when a blog was all you needed and RSS would do the rest. Maybe with the rise of the fediverse we might see a return to something like those days… but it’s hard to be optimistic about social media with the way it has been trending this past decade.

Anyway, exciting news: A-Yokai-A-Day will return as scheduled in just 10 more days!

Last year I began sharing tales from an Edo period story collection called Shokoku hyakumonogatari (“100 tales from various provinces”). It’s a fantastic collection of tales about yokai, ghosts, hauntings, etc., and as the name implies, there are 100 tales. Last year I shared 31 of them, and this year I will share the next 31 stories from this book during A-Yokai-A-Day.

I started A-Yokai-A-Day in 2009 as a personal project, but it became a lot more popular than I expected, and soon other people were sharing their own daily yokai posts during October. I love it! I will be sharing these posts on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X/whatever-its-called, and Mastodon) using the #ayokaiaday hashtag, and I hope others will too! Every day during October, sketch or doodle a yokai; or share a favorite story or painting; or anything at all to celebrate Japanese folklore with me!

See you soon!