Greetings yokai lovers!

It’s October, and you know what that means: it’s time for A-Yokai-A-Day!

This year, like every year since 2009, I will be painting a yokai every single day of the month and posting it to my blog. Click here for my A-Yokai-A-Day archives to see yokai posts from the past decade.

If you’d like to join me and many others in painting a yokai a day this month, all you have to do is paint, draw, or create any yokai you like, and share it using the hashtag #ayokaiaday. There’s no set list of yokai you have to paint, but you’re free to browse yokai.com or any other yokai resource and choose your favorites.

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For me, 2020’s theme is pretty much dictated by the events of the year. The pandemic has allowed me to turn some attention to disease-and-cure-themed yokai, like all of the amabie types that I’ve posted on my Patreon this year. But there’s so much more than I’ve been able to cover so far, so it makes sense to dig a little deeper into it during a marathon-like project such as A-Yokai-A-Day.

When I was writing The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, I included a bunch of disease-causing yokai from an old Edo Period medicine book called Harikikigaki. You can see them here. These mushi, or “bugs,” are what Japan imagined the causes of sickness were, well before the germ theory of medicine was available.

To give you an idea of what the original work looked like, here are a few scanned pages from Harikikigaki:

Each entry describes a particular mushi that causes the sickness, the disease symptoms it imparts, and how to treat it using acupuncture, Taoist magic, and herbal remedies. The philosophy in this book is pretty fascinating, and quite complicated. It’s based on traditional Chinese folk magic , so in the descriptions of these mushi you’ll see the names of a lot of herbs, as well as Chinese elements. If you’d like to know more about those, Wikipedia does a good job of running it down.

There are so many of them (over 60 in the Harikikigaki, and hundreds of others scattered throughout the whole of folklore), and showcasing more of them has been a long time goal of mine. So you won’t see any repeats from my books or yokai.com during this year’s A-Yokai-A-Day.

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So, with introductions out of the way, on to today’s A-Yokai-A-Day entry.

Jinshaku
腎積

Translation: kidney shaku*
Alternate names: honton (“running pig”)

Jinshaku is a bug that affects, as the name suggests, in the kidneys. It resides beneath the belly button, but it incessantly moves up and down inside the body, causing pain.

Overall, it resembles a tiny boar. It’s back is whitish while its belly is red. It has two long, red protrusions on its face that look like a mustache. Its tongue is very long, and its tail and legs are short. It is usually accompanied by a number of small, white worms, together with which it rampages around throughout the body.

In Chinese Elemental Theory, the area a jinshaku lives in (below the belly) is related to the north direction. However, elementally it is categorized as a water spirit, so it endlessly wanders about inside the body like a flowing liquid.

Symptoms of a jinshaku infection include a difficulty in detecting the pulse in the wrists. The face and body turn dark, and the patient develops a taste for salty foods. A severe, putrid smell emanates from the breath.

It can be treated by numerous acupuncture methods. (These closely guarded secrets were always transferred by oral tradition, and so the book only ever mentions if there are treatments or not, but never what they are!)

*Shaku is a word we’ll see quite a few times this month. It’s not easily definable or translatable. It’s essentially one of a few categories of sickness that the creatures we’ll be looking at fall into. The basic theory behind them was that various types of energies would accumulate as shaku in the organs until they become a large mass, which would then cause various symptoms to occur.

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If you enjoyed today’s A-Yokai-A-Day entry, please consider becoming a patron and supporting my work by visiting patreon.com/osarusan.

For your reading pleasure, here is a list of links to all of the story posts containing Ino mononoke roku, posted for A-Yokai-A-Day 2019:

Introduction
Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12
Day 13
Day 14
Day 15
Day 16
Day 17
Day 18
Day 19
Day 20
Day 21
Day 22
Day 23
Day 24
Day 25
Day 26
Day 27
Day 28
Day 29
Day 30

 Greetings yokai fans!

Today is the final day of A-Yokai-A-Day, and the final entry in Ino Mononoke Roku! I know you’ve been waiting patiently for this, so I’ll just keep the intro quick. I wanted to say thanks for your support this month. Without your generous patronage, I would not be able to literally spend a whole month translating and painting, every single day. So thanks to all of you for making this possible.

I will have November’s yokai plans up in a day or two, but tomorrow I will be spending the day sleeping in and catching up on emails and chores that I haven’t been able to do because of A-Yokai-A-Day.

And now, on to the moment you’ve all been waiting for: the exciting conclusion of Ino mononoke roku!

By the thirtieth day, all of Heitaro’s friends, family, and neighbors had spread the news far and wide of the bizarre haunting at the Ino residence. As for Heitaro himself, the strangeness had been going on for so long that he had practically grown used to it.

That day, a well dressed and sharp looking samurai in his 40’s came to visit Heitaro. At his first glance, Heitaro recognized that this man was the source of the whole haunting.

“Ah, the yokai’s true form finally shows itself!” Young Heitaro grabbed his katana and swore to take the samurai down in a single cut.

As soon as Heitaro’s sword was drawn, the samurai vanished. Then, from Heitaro’s ceiling came a voice: “Please, put your sword away.”

Heitaro cooled his head. He put his sword away and waited to see what the spirits’ next move would be.

Then, the lid of his hearth popped off, and a massive puff of thick smoke billowed into the room. The smoke gathered together and congealed into the shape of a large head.

A boil on the thing’s forehead began to swell up. Suddenly a massive amount of smoke and worms burst forth from the boil. Worms covered the floor and crawled all over Heitaro.

Worms! It had to be worms! Heitaro hated worms!

Then, a pair of eyes sprouted from the wall and began to glare at Heitaro. A mouth appeared beneath them and laughed at him.

As the worms crawling over his body and into his clothes approached Heitaro’s absolute limit, they suddenly vanished.

Phew!

Then the mysterious samurai materialized once more.

“My name is Sanmoto Gorozaemon. I am a demon lord. Another demon lord named Shinno Akugoro and I had a contest to see who was scarier. We would each scare one hundred people, and the winner would become the top demon lord. I scared eighty five people before you, Heitaro. You would have been my eighty sixth. But I could not scare you. Your courage is exceptionally rare, and deserves to be rewarded.”

Sanmoto Gorozaemon presented Heitaro with a wooden mallet.

“One day my competitor may come for you. If he does, strike a pillar with this mallet, and I shall come to your aid. We will defeat Shinno Akugoro together.”

Heitaro noticed that a god of protection was sitting beside him.

Then, a splendid palanquin appeared, and Heitaro’s yard was filled with dozens and dozens of yokai of all shapes and sizes. Sanmoto Gorozaemon climbed into the palanquin, and the yokai hoisted it up onto their shoulders.

The demons gathered into a big parade and carried the palanquin off into the night sky. They danced and cavorted as they went.

Heitaro watched the night parade disappear into the clouds, returning to wherever they had come from.

Twenty nine days! “How long will this continue,” thought Heitaro. The haunting showed no sign of letting up.

As Heitaro sat wondering what kind of surprise the spirits had in store for him today, an ill wind began to blow into his house.

And on the strange wind, something twinkling…

Sparkles, like tiny stars, floated in on the foul wind and spread throughout every room of Heitaro’s house. They lodged themselves into every crack and crevice.

Luckily, nothing was burned.

During the twenty eighth day, Heitaro heard the distant sound of shakuhachi being played.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a huge group of mendicant monks appeared! They filed into Heitaro’s yard, his balcony, and every room until his whole house was filled with monks.

All day long the monks played their ear-piercing flutes. All night long too.

Poor Heitaro just lay in bed and closed his eyes…

Another sleepless night.

On day twenty seven, Heitaro sat down to work at his writing desk. Even though it was midday, darkness began to grow all around him, like rolling clouds.

Eventually, it became as dark as blackest night. Poor Heitaro couldn’t see anything at all, let alone write.

Then, all of a sudden, it became blindingly bright!

That night, mysterious noises were heard all around Heitaro’s house. Among them were the sound of wooden clappers being struck, and women’s laughter.