Today’s yokai is not cute, but it should make you laugh. In fact, its name is the sound of laughter (“heehee!”).

A lot of these animal yokai originated in China and were re-invented by Japanese encyclopedia writers during the Edo period. This is one such yokai. The boom in printing production during the late 18th century caused a huge rise in literacy as well as cheap, illustrated books for the masses. Because it was difficult for Japanese to travel, they often collected books full of pictures of distant lands, and full of stories and tales from those places. The authors of this period translated and reinterpreted older Chinese texts, often giving the creatures a distinctive Japanese identity through their reinterpretations. Other authors did their best to remain faithful to the source material, but nonetheless made mistakes (as we will see later this month, one author mistook a Chinese general for the Chinese god of the toilets, and a strange new yokai was born—but I digress).

Like some other other beast-yokai (baku, kirin, wani, and a few others), this creature eventually ended up lending its name to a real-world animal. Today, the word hihi means “baboon” in Japanese. It’s not so difficult to see the resemblance!

Hihi / 狒々 / ひひ

Click here or on the image to view the full entry on yokai.com!

Today’s yokai is the third and final “evolution” of the adorable nobusuma which we looked at earlier, and it is no longer cute at all.

This was the first of the really difficult entries to do for The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits. Most yokai that I translate are pretty straightforward—they really only exist as a couple of sentences in old storybooks, and they are pretty simple and easy to understand. And then there are others that include really subtle jokes or references that require a really in-depth knowledge of the pop culture of the time these creatures were in vogue. This is one of those strangely detailed ones that is hard to understand if you only look at it in today’s light.

A number of yokai master Toriyama Sekien’s creations included references to hanafuda, a card game that was extremely popular in the Edo period. (It’s still somewhat popular today, and a pretty fun game!) I won’t go so much into the details here because I do so on the yokai.com page, but let me just say it was not obvious at first sight! It took a lot of translating, researching, and helpful explanations by my wife to figure out all of the weird cultural connections associated with this yokai. While now I can look at it and say, “Ooooooh, that makes perfect sense,” before it all would just gone over my head.

When I read about these yokai, I wonder how obvious certain things like that would have been to contemporary residents of Edo, and the purchaser of Sekien’s books… Would common folks have immediately gotten the jokes, or would they have to be aristocrats or literati in order to fully appreciate the amazing subtle touches that he put in his yokai encyclopedias? Even when he only writes one or two sentences about a yokai, the name and the illustration alone can say so much more. Toriyama Sekien truly was a great artist!

百々爺 / ももんじい / Momonjii

Head of over to yokai.com to read the whole story about this creepy old man yokai who evolves from a humble bat, and to learn about the crazy cultural references that Toriyama Sekien managed to squeeze into his description!

Welcome back for day 3 of A-Yokai-A-Day 2014 edition!

Today’s yokai is quite funny, though you wouldn’t think so if you were on the receiving end of its attack I suppose…

I say it’s funny because of mostly how it looks, but also because the idea is just so bizarre! A soul-sucking vampiric monkey which is actually a transformed bat who kisses people in the night to steal their life force… while I can’t say it doesn’t get any weirder than that (these are yokai we are talking about, after all) this does rank pretty high on the strangeness scale.

Researching animal yokai is always quite fun. Many animals in Japanese folklore will actually evolve into other animals as they age, and eventually into yokai, but it is rare that one yokai evolves into another. It shows that in old Japan there really was not much of a difference between what constitutes a yokai and an animal—these were all believed to be living things inhabiting the same world as people. Some of what we see today as the “magic powers” that some of these yokai had were not really considered magical at all. In many cases, they were considered completely natural phenomena.

What makes this animal/yokai so particularly interesting is that, while transforming from one creature into another is not uncommon, transforming multiple times into such different monsters is fairly rare among yokai. That is why I say that this is truly one of the most “Pokemon-like” yokai out there.

Anyway, here is the painting. Click for the full description on yokai.com!

Yamachichi / 山地乳 / やまちち

Today we continue A-Yokai-A-Day with another cute-yet-creepy yokai. Though similar-looking to yesterday’s nodeppou, today’s nobusuma has very different origins and slightly different behavior.

The most fascinating thing about today’s yokai is that not only does it evolve from a regular animal into a yokai, it evolves again and again into more powerful yokai forms! Does that sound familiar? If you are at all interested in Japanese pop culture, it should!

Though not a direct ancestor of Pokemon, there is no doubt that Pokemon were deeply influenced by the yokai tradition. In fact, some Pokemon are direct copies of certain yokai, though with newer-sounding names tacked on. The nobusuma, being one of the most dynamically changing yokai over its lifespan, really evokes the feeling of Pokemon or other video game characters morphing into a new form when they reach a certain power level. Today you get to see its first yokai form (evolved from a wild bat), and later this week we will look at some of its more advanced yokai forms!

Nobusuma / 野衾 / のぶすま

To learn more about nobusuma and other awesome yokai, visit yokai.com/nobusuma. And if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to check out my book on Amazon.com, in paperback and Kindle formats!

Greetings readers! Long time no blog! I have been busy painting yokai for my upcoming book, The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, and I haven’t spent much time posting because of that. If you’ve been following me on Facebook, you’ve probably seen a few previews of the illustrations for the book. No doubt you have been wondering what some of the yokai are and wanting to learn more about them! Well never fear, because A-Yokai-A-Day is here back!

As in past years, I will be revealing a new yokai each day of this month. As I am hard at work on the new book, this year each yokai will be an entry from the book in progress. This means that those of you who are Kickstarter backers may already have seen some of these yokai, but I only have so many hours in a day to paint, so that’s the best I can do. I hope you enjoy them all the same! For those of you who missed the Kickstarter, these will be new yokai for you, so I know you will enjoy them!

I will be posting the yokai entries on yokai.com, while here on MatthewMeyer.net I’ll be talking about the yokai and the process of making them in a more casual manner. Sort of a behind-the-scenes of the making of the book and of the entries on yokai.com. I will be posting the illustrations on both sites.

As usual, I will be starting off with some softer, tamer yokai and moving towards the more grotesque and scary ones as we get closer to Halloween. Today’s yokai is pretty darn cute, but you wouldn’t want to cuddle this vampiric flying squirrel!

Nodeppou / 野鉄砲 / のでっぽう

To learn more about nodeppou and other awesome yokai, visit yokai.com/nodeppou. And if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to check out my book on Amazon.com, in paperback and Kindle formats!

A-Yokai-A-Day is over, and sadly you will have to wait 11 more months until fresh new yokai illustrations appear on this blog again. In the meantime, though, you can enjoy the A-Yokai-A-Day archives from past years (2012, 2011, 2010, 2009) as well as this year’s selection of yokai. Here is the grand list of all of the yokai posts from this year’s edition of A-Yokai-A-Day: Continue reading →

Happy Halloween!

Today marks the final day in this year’s A-Yokai-A-Day, as well as the final day in The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits Kickstarter project. Starting tomorrow all of the Kickstarter updates will be private to backers only, so now is your last chance to get in, even at the $1 level! Just over an hour left to join! Don’t miss out!

Shiryō (死霊, しりょう)

Shiryō means “dead ghost” and stands in contrast to the ikiryō, or living ghost.

Shiryō can be considered synonymous with yūrei (“faint spirit”), as they are both words for the classic Japanese ghost. However while yūrei can be creepy some times and beautifully mysterious at other times, shiryō is only used to refer to scary, nasty ghosts. The inclusion of the kanji for “death” in the name is the clue that this ghost is not to be romanticised.

Shiryō can act in similar ways as ikiryō, appearing to relatives or close friends of the deceased. While ikiryō usually appear in the moments just before death, a shiryō appears in the moments just after death. When they appear, it is most often to give one last goodbye to their loved ones before departing… however, when a shiryō appears it is not always to say goodbye, but instead to take their loved ones with them into the world beyond…

Shiryō belief goes back into the mists of unrecorded history in Japanese folklore, and has long been a staple of folk superstition. One famous account is recorded in the Tōno Monogatari, a 1910 collection of folk beliefs which gave birth to the field of academic folklore research in Japan. In this story, there was a young girl who lived together with her father. After her father died, his shiryō appeared before the young girl and tried to take her with him into the world of the dead. The girl narrowly escaped and fled from the house to ask for help. Every night, various friends and distant family members agreed to stay overnight in the house with her and watch over her, and every night without fail, her father’s shiryō came looking for her, to try to take her away. Finally, after a month of sleepless, terrifying nights, the ghost stopped appearing, and the girl was left in peace.