Greeting yokai lovers!

I hope you are all weathering the storm. Right now my American home is under over a foot of snow, and my Japanese home is under 3 feet of snow, so everyone in my family is buried in it! But that makes it a good day to sit in with a hot cup of tea and paint all day long. Today’s yokai is perfect for this weather. 

Oh, and we just surpassed the $350 mark, which was the first goal for this Patreon! Hoorah! That means I will be working on adding a searchable tag cloud to the site. It shouldn’t take terribly long, but I will have to write the page, as well as double check all of the tags on each yokai to make sure I haven’t missed any important tags. I’ll post again when that is all finished, but it is something to look forward to in the future! In the meantime, I hope you enjoy today’s yokai!

甘酒婆

あまざけばばあ

TRANSLATION: amazake (a sweet, low-alcohol content form of sake) hag

ALTERNATE NAMES: amazake banbā

HABITAT: dark streets at night, particularly in urban areas

DIET: amazake and sake

APPEARANCE: Amazake babā is a haggardly old woman from northeastern Japan. She is practically indistinguishable from an ordinary old woman, which makes her difficult to recognize as a yōkai until it is too late.

INTERACTIONS: Amazake babā appears on winter nights and travels from house to house. She knocks on doors and calls out, “Might you have any amazake?” Those who answer her, whether the answer is yes or no, fall terribly ill. A cedar branch hung over the door is said to keep the amazake babā from approaching your house.

A variation of amazake babā from Yamanashi prefecture is called amazake banbā. She travels from house to house trying to sell sake and amazake. The consequences of replying to her are the same as with amazake babā, but the way to keep her at bay is slightly different. If you hang a sign at the front door that says “we do not like sake or amazake,” she will leave you alone and go on to the next house.

ORIGIN: Originally amazake babā was considered to be a god of disease—specifically smallpox. During smallpox outbreaks, there was a large increase in amazake babā sightings in major urban centers across Japan, not just in the northeast. Rumors of old women roaming the streets at night selling sake and bringing sickness were rampant in large cities such as Edo, Kyōto, Osaka, and Nagoya. Fear of smallpox was a major concern in urban centers, and contributed to the popularity of amazake babā rumors.

Since the eradication of smallpox, the sickness spread by amazake babā’s has changed from smallpox to the common cold. Even today, statues of her can be found in cities. Mothers visit these statues to leave offerings of sake and amazake so that that their children will not become sick.

Greetings patrons!

Today I bring you January’s first yokai. At first I expected this one to be pretty simple, and I suppose it was in a way. But it was simple because there was literally only one single reference to it in all of Japanese folklore! And sometimes it takes a lot of research to find that out. This is one of those yokai for which nothing exists at all except for a single illustration, with no accompanying text at all, so everything is speculative. (I have added that image as an attachment, along with my sketch of it, if you are interested!) Still, it is a cute yokai and just like the person who requested it, I wished that there was more to know about it.

One of my favorite things to paint is waves like the ones you see above. One of my friends calls them “candy waves” and I like that. They do take a terribly long time though! I’m glad that, even if shihofuki is pretty much unknown and mysterious, I got to paint him along with some candy waves. I hope you all enjoy it!

This post was made possible by the generous support from my Patreon backers. If you like yokai and want to learn more, please consider pledging $1 per month to support my work.

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Happy New Year, everyone!

I’m a bit behind on this final December yokai due to the hardware failure earlier this month. But I just finished her and wanted to share. I will put a longer writeup on yokai.com a little later.

This is kitsune tsuki, or fox possession. We looked at myobu and Kuzunoha, two examples of good foxes… well kitsune tsuki is done by bad foxes. They possess people, causing sickness or mental illness. In fact, up until modern medicine was introduced to Japan, many illness were blamed on foxes! And virtually all mental illness was blamed on them!

Foxes can possess the weak-minded, and are especially good at possessing women (yes, Japanese folklore is very sexist). They enter through a number of places, particularly under the finger nails. There is a long laundry list of symptoms, and the long and short of it is that you need an onmyoji to get the fox spirit out of you.

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I will be posting a January yokai plan soon, so if you have any yokai you’d like to see, please leave a comment here. Otherwise, you can leave it up to me and I will choose some fun ones! 🙂 I’ll post the hi-res files separately, and I will post again when the writeup for this one is on yokai.com.

Happy New Year!

Greetings, backers!

Today I bring you another kitsune for kitsune month! Today’s is a fairly famous one, and if you’ve read The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, you’ve seen her name before: Kuzunoha, the mother of Abe no Seimei!

You can also view her up on yokai.com/kuzunoha

葛の葉
くずのは

TRANSLATION: kudzu leaves
ALTERNATE NAMES: Shinodazuma (the Wife of Shinoda)

ORIGIN: Kuzunoha is a byakko, or white kitsune. She is most famous for being the wife of Abe no Yasuna and the mother of Abe no Seimei. Her story is preserved in a number of kabuki and bunraku plays. The Inari shrine near where Abe no Yasuna first met Kuzunoha still stands today, and is popularly known as the Kuzunoha Shrine.

LEGENDS: During the reign of Emperor Murakami (946—967 CE), the onmyōji Abe no Yasuna sought to rebuild his family house. The Abe family had once been a rich and powerful one, but their land and status were lost years before by Yasuna’s father, who had been tricked by con men. While rebuilding his house, Yasuna regularly traveled to the Inari shrine in Shinoda, Izumi Province, to pray for the god’s blessings.

One day, while walking through the woods of Shinoda, a beautiful white fox jumped in front of Yasuna’s path. It was being chased by a hunter, and it asked Yasuna to save it. Yasuna knew that white foxes were holy to Inari, and he helped the creature to escape. Shortly afterwards, the hunter came to where Yasuna was and the two got into a fight. Yasuna was wounded in the fight, and fell to the ground.

After the hunter left, a young woman came out of the forest to Yasuna’s side. She told him her name was Kuzunoha. She took Yasuna all the way back to his home, and nursed him back to health. The woman continued to visit Yasuna, caring for him and checking up on his recovery. At some point during her visits, Kuzunoha and Yasuna had fallen in love, and so when he was better they got married.

Eventually Kuzunoha became pregnant, and she bore Yasuna a son. They three of them lived happily for some time. However, when their son was five years old, he witnessed something strange. Some say it was when she looked in a mirror, others say it was while she was sleeping; but his mother accidentally let her true form appear for a brief second: she a white-furred kitsune!

Her secret having been discovered, Kuzunoha had no choice but to leave her beloved family. Holding a brush in her mouth, she wrote a farewell tanka on the paper door and vanished:

If you love me, come and visit, in the forest of Shinoda in Izumi, the resentful kudzu leaf

When Yasuna read her poem, he realized that his beloved wife was the fox whom he had saved years earlier. He and their son traveled to the forests of Shinoda, where Kuzunoha had first entered the world of humankind. There, Kuzunoha appeared before them one last time. She presented them a crystal ball and a golden box as parting gifts, and then she left her human family forever.

Kuzunoha and Yasuna’s son grew up to become a powerful sorcerer, thanks to the magical gifts his mother had given him, her yōkai lineage, and his father’s onmyōji training. He took the name Abe no Seimei, and became the most powerful onmyōji in all of Japanese history.

Greetings, patrons!

Great news! My new painting tablet arrived yesterday. It’s been a harrowing two weeks… The customer support at Wacom was a nightmare, and very unhelpful, but I finally managed to get a replacement tablet for the defective one (at no charge… which is nice when we’re talking about a $2500 tool…). The wait time was the worst part of all, and I was beginning to think I might have to put this project on pause this month.

But luckily my new tablet arrived yesterday, and I spent the whole day updating and installing software and getting back to work. Since I finished all of the sketching and research for this month during the almost 20-day hiatus from painting, the only thing left to do is ink and paint the illustrations for this month. So, for that reason, today I can present to you myoubu, the good fox spirits who serve Inari! It’s a little later than I had hoped, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless.

I will be creating 2 more yokai during the next week, so it’s going to be a busy week catching up on painting. But don’t worry, you will have two more kitsune before New Year’s!

This post was made possible by the generous support from my Patreon backers. If you like yokai and want to learn more, please consider pledging $1 per month to support my work.

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Greetings patrons!

Tonight I bring you November’s last yokai, and like the others this month, he is pretty silly!

Your cards will be charged some time this week, and I will be sending out the postcards and other rewards after that. Being December, international backers will be getting their quarterly packages as well!

To those of you receiving prints, if you have any preference of what print(s) you want to receive, send me a message and I will make them for you. Otherwise, I will surprise you! 🙂

Now, on to today’s yokai:

苦笑

にがわらい

TRANSLATION: bitter smile

HABITAT: inhabited areas

DIET: hatred and ill-feelings

APPEARANCE: Nigawarai are large, ugly yokai with horns and green-tinged, hairy bodies. They wear dirty rags. Their hairy mouths are twisted into what looks like a forced smile. Their hands end in sharp, poisonous claws, which is powerful enough to paralyze small animals.

BEHAVIOR: Nigawarai are created out of the ill feelings of human beings—particularly, feelings of ill-humor and forced, feigned amusement. As their name suggests, they are connected with the “bitter smiles” that people make when trying to hide their feelings of discomfort. They cause ill-will, disgust and encourage arguments. They both feed off of and spread these negative feelings in the people around them.

INTERACTIONS: When used in cooking, the poison from a nigawarai’s claws makes food terribly bitter. However, it has the ability to cure stomach pain, making nigawarai a useful yōkai for medicinal purposes.

ORIGIN: The earliest references to nigawarai go back to the Muromachi period, where they appear in monster scrolls. These paintings appeared without description, so the original intent of the artist in describing this yōkai is unknown. Over the centuries, nigawarai continued to appear in other monster scrolls, and through the work of numerous artists eventually developed the traits that they are known for today.

Greetings backers!

Today I bring to you a two-for-one deal. That is to say, one painting, two yokai!

The reason is that these yokai are pretty sparse in information, so I combined them into one illustration so that when they eventually appear in a book, they won’t have a ton of blank space.

Also, they naturally go together, as the first (and practically the only) illustration of either of them is a scroll painted in 1666, in which they appear together.

I am posting them to yokai.com as I write this, so you can read about them here:

http://yokai.com/takonyuudou/

http://yokai.com/unagihime/

I hope you enjoy them! 🙂

Sketches and line art are attached to the bottom of this post. Hi-res files will be in a separate post for the $5+ backers.