Hey everyone! It’s the end of the September, and that means Halloween season is almost upon us! Personally I think that all of September should just be called Halloween Eve, but I’ll make do with a month-long celebration of horror as I do every year, with A-Yokai-A-Day!

For those of you unfamiliar with A-Yokai-A-Day, it’s a project I started in 2009 to celebrate traditional Japanese horror, yokai, ghost stories, kaidan, etc. Early on, I introduced specific yokai on this blog — a project which eventually evolved into yokai.com and my own yokai encyclopedias. In recent years I’ve translated longer epics, Edo period supernatural comics, and short ghost story collections. For the past two years I’ve translated stories from Shokoku hyakumonogatari, a collection of spooky and weird tales (kaidan) published in 1677.

This year I’ll be continuing Shokoku hyakumonogatari, and by October 31st I’ll have translated 93 out of 100 of the stories in this book! You can catch up on stories 1 through 62 in my blog’s A-Yokai-A-Day archives here: 2022, 2023.

And if you feel so inclined, please feel free to join me in celebrating Japanese folklore this Halloween season by sharing your own yokai stories, sketches, paintings, and anything else using the hashtag #ayokaiaday!