The longest and most tiresome part of working on my yokai books is the translating and writing period. By tiresome I don’t mean that it is boring or uninteresting — on the contrary it is totally engrossing — but just that is it completely exhausting! Some yokai only have a single sentence of back story to their entire name, which I try my best to expand to a full page by giving detailed background information that may not be apparent… while other yokai lead me down long, twisting, turning trails of research that require me to spend hours or even days of translating just to end up with a single paragraph for the book. Down the rabbit-hole of research, so to speak. This generally happens more often with religious-themed yokai, because there is so much more documentation and so many more variations on the same theme (and they are often contradictory!) that it is incredibly hard to distill them down into one single entry. One example of this is a recent entry I did on Meido, or the Japanese underworld — the place souls go before they go to Heaven, get reborn, or get flushed down to Hell.
Many English-language resources refer to Meido as a sort of Japanese version of Hades or Purgatory. While there are a number of similarities between these Western myths and Meido, there is not an actual cultural link between them. The idea of Meido was derived from the Chinese fusion of Indian Buddhism with local folklore, reinterpreted through a Japanese lense, and Hades and Purgatory developed along totally different lines. I don’t like to make too many cross-cultural comparisons in my writing because it can oversimplify and lead to wrong conclusions, and I also think it is more interesting to the reader to hear a fresh description rather than just making comparisons to other myths.
This was a fun topic for me because I studied Tibetan and Indian religions in college, so the Buddhist and vedic origins of Japanese Buddhism were familiar to me, but the way that they have changed on their long journey from India through China and Korea and finally to Japan is just fascinating. While the vast majority of Japanese Buddhism would be recognizable to someone who was only familiar with Indian (or even Western) Buddhism, there are really neat differences that don’t exist in the Buddhist cosmologies that we are most commonly exposed to here in the English speaking world.
Here is a bit of writing I did about Meido, the first stop for souls on their way to the next life, which will appear in The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits: Continue reading
