Greetings yokai fans!
Today is Hina matsuri, and like I said the other day, this yokai has nothing to do with Hina matsuri whatsoever; however, it is a doll and this is doll’s festival, so that alone makes it related enough for me. I hope you enjoy this creepy one!
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.
Greetings yokai fans!
Today I bring you two more fun yokai that live inside of you! I hope you’re all feeling well. 😉
In case you are wondering where your postcards are this month, there has been a slight delay and I haven’t been able to send them out yet. You may remember I asked last month about making new postcards. I ordered them at the end of January, and they were supposed to arrive in 10 days, but they haven’t come yet. So I’ve contacted the print company to find out what’s wrong, but for the time please wait a bit longer for January’s postcards. I will send them as soon as I get them!
And now, on to the good stuff!
The main reason I picked these two guys was because I thought they were cute. There’s not anything in particular connecting them, but I didn’t want to leave them out. I kind of feel that way with a lot of the critters in the Harikikigaki, but I had to draw the line somewhere, so I drew it right after these two. If you guys want to see more infectious yokai in the future, let me know and I’ll happily do some more!
In March I’m going to try to pick up the pace and complete a few more entries, since my painting speed has slowed down a bit during my move to Japan. As always, if you have any requests that you haven’t told me about yet, feel free to leave them in the comments!
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.
Greetings yokai fans!
It’s been one month since I touched down in Japan, and it’s been a busy one! But things are finally settling in and I’ve been able to get to making good progress on yokai again. We moved in to our house on February 4th, got heating installed the following week, making it actually possible to live there, and finally got internet access installed early this week, making it possible to live and work here full-time! I’m still setting up a studio space, but for now I am able to do my painting in the living room, bundled up under my kotatsu.
Today’s post probably would have been more fun on Valentine’s Day, with all the blood-sucking and increased libido and other traits these guys have, but sadly they weren’t ready by then. But I hope you’ll still enjoy them as a late Valentine’s Day present!
There’s one more set of bugs coming after this one, and after that I’ll be moving back to more “traditional” yokai!
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.
Greetings yokai fans!
As I am fighting off a cold and some food poisoning, I am wondering how many of these little guys I have inside of me right now! But painting has been helping me to forget the discomfort. Hopefully you can enjoy these without having to feel their effects!
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.
Greetings yokai fans!
I’m still battling jet lag after landing in Japan earlier this week. Most of this week has been spent house-hunting, registering with the city, getting my phone & accounts in order, and that kind of boring official stuff, but I have managed to squeeze in some painting time to work on these two guys.
The text these are from, the Harikikigaki, is an old book kept in the Kyushu National Museum. It details the human body, the five elements, and how they related to sickness. It’s based mostly on Chinese medicine and philosophy. I’m now working with a couple books based on the Harikikigaki that I didn’t have access to in the US, and since online sources only cover a handful of these “bugs,” I’m excited to get to do a little deeper work with more of them. Hopefully some of the upcoming ones will be new to the eyes of even the most dedicated yokai fans!
As you’ve seen with the previous parasitic yokai posts, I’m grouping them into pairs and trios based on shared traits. In this case, Koseu and Oozakenomushi are on the same page because they are both alcoholic bugs! Both of these guys live inside you and love sake, and of course cause you to drink too much. I really love the Koseu though, because not only can this bearded worm-bug speak, but it has a funny little umbrella protuberance on its head which blocks medicine, making him very hard to get rid of!
There will be another bug painting towards the end of this month, and sketches for that coming soon! I don’t yet have a proper studio space set up, so I’m squeezing in work whenever and wherever I have the chance.
More soon!
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.
Today’s yokai continues the theme of the week: aquatic yokai.
I painted this yokai earlier this year at the request of one of my Patreon backers. He had found it in the book Yokai Museum, and asked me to explain more about it. Yokai Museum is a cool book showcasing some of the collection of yokai scrolls and paintings belonging to Yumoto Koichi—yokai researcher, professor, and former curatorial director of the Kawasaki City Museum. This particular yokai exists solely in his collection; it appears only on the Bakemono tsukushi emaki, a yokai scroll painted in 1820. What’s interesting about this scroll is that it contains a lot of yokai which don’t appear anywhere else in folklore. Most likely they were entirely made up by the artist. However, since he didn’t give any explanation text along with his illustrations, we can only speculate about these yokai. I wish we knew more, because the illustrations in that scroll are fantastic!
A lot of yokai work is like that—guesswork. Usually it’s not too hard to get a general idea of the yokai’s concept, because so many of them are puns or plays on previously created yokai. Of course, it helps to have a bit of knowledge of other yokai, the author’s personality, and the context in which it was written. That’s not so hard with Toriyama Sekien’s yokai, because he had a very distinct sense of humor. But with this particular scroll, we don’t have much of that, so we have to rely on the names.
Shihofuki pretty much literally means “salt sprayer,” and judging by its appearance, we can picture it leaping out of the water and spitting salt at passing boats. Maybe it is the creature that sprays you with water when you sit too close to the edge of a boat.
I really love this yokai, partially because it is so adorable, but also in part because of its mysterious nature. People often ask me to elaborate on a yokai’s “powers” or “abilities” as if they were creatures in a video game with specific abilities. But yokai can not be so well-defined. They are by their very nature and definition mysterious. They exist in the spaces that we don’t know and don’t understand. Their whole appeal is their mystery. When you define them too much, they start to lose their mystique, and the very essence of “yokai-ness.” Shihofuki, and the others for which we have literally no information at all, will always remain ill-defined, and so will always be excellent examples of true yokai.
Click below to read about shihofuki on yokai.com:
Shihofuki
The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons show opened up last Friday, and it’s been a great success so far. Everyone’s reactions have been very interesting — from kids insisting that they aren’t scared while gritting their teeth and refusing to look anywhere but at the floor, to adults doing pretty much the same thing. I’m really enjoying meeting fans and hearing what they have to say about the book. One family brought in their tattered copy for me to sign. Their kids love it so much they take it everywhere they go, and it looked like it could have been 20 years old instead of only a couple of months.
Here are a couple of articles about the show. The first one is from Urala, Fukui prefecture’s monthly magazine. They got my website address wrong (.com instead of .net), but oh well. The article looks nice anyway, and it’s an honor to be in Urala:
Urala, August 2012
On the first day of the show, a reporter who really loves yokai came from the Fukui Shinbun to take some photos and write an article. He was squirming and making faces while reading each yokai description, and letting out yelps and shouts. But he stayed for an hour and came back again later in the day. He said really enjoyed the show, and he wrote a great article to go with it:
Fukui Shinbun, July 28, 2012
If you haven’t come to the show yet, please do! I’ll be there every weekend and sporadically throughout the week until August 16th! | 福井の情報誌URALAさんでも紹介されました！
Urala, August 2012
福井新聞で「百鬼夜行展」の紹介をしてもらえました！
Fukui Shinbun, July 28, 2012