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
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, 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.
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! 🙂
Nigawarai
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 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! 🙂
Unagi hime & Tako nyuudou
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 Patrons!
It’s been a long two weeks since the last yokai, but today I bring you sunekosuri, one of the sweetest and cutest yokai there are! I’m sharing it here with you first, and it will go live on yokai.com later this evening.
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.
We did it! We made it all the way to the end of the month without being cursed or killed by any of the evil spirits we’ve invoked over the past 31 days!
But don’t think you’re off the hook yet, because tonight’s is a doozie!
I love urban legends. They are the modern version of yokai, and the ones that stick around for a few years are the ones that are most likely going to stick around for centuries. We’ve all heard the one about the person who wakes up in a bathtub full of ice after a party to find their kidneys have been taken out, or that you can summon the ghost of Bloody Mary in your bathroom mirror at midnight… We all heard these tales as kids, and we all heard them fresh from other kids rather than reading them in books. That is the charm of the urban legend. And Japan is no exception in this way. Even the internet-age equivalent—creepypasta—has a very real effect on culture, and shapes modern folklore.
Japanese urban legends have their own flavor to them, but they follow the same rules as Western ones. Of course, just as Japanese ghost stories make Western ghost stories look like fairy tales, Japanese urban legends make Western ones shake in their boots.
Today’s yokai, the teke teke, will give you chills. Click below to read it!
If you enjoyed A-Yokai-A-Day, please join my Patreon project. Researching, translating, writing, and painting these yokai takes a lot of time and effort, and your support makes it possible for me to continue doing this. Thanks to Patreon, I will be able to continue making yokai throughout the year. So if you are a fan of yokai, yurei, and Japanese folklore, you can get new yokai year-round and support me with just $1/month!
Today’s yokai is another tatarigami. Along with yesterday’s yokai, Sugawara no Michizane and one from last year, Taira no Masakado, he is one of the three greatest ghosts of Japan. And it really seems appropriate for him to be one of the top three, as he was also the most powerful person in Japan: the emperor.
One thing I find very interesting about Sutoku Tenno is that by some accounts, he turned into a tengu after his death, while in other accounts, he turned into a ghost after his death. If you remember from the articles on gaki and ashura, tengu are outside of the realm of death and rebirth. They are no longer connected to Buddhism, and are forever doomed to their unpleasant existence. Vengeful ghosts, on the other hand, can be appeased, pacified, and even turned into benevolent kami.
So while the question of whether Sutoku Tenno turned into a tengu or a ghost after his death may seem at face value to be a superficial distinction, in actuality it says a lot about him: is he a ghost who can be elevated to godhood and honored as a protector? Or were his crimes so awful that his soul is totally irredeemable, and he must live for the rest of time as a terrible, evil tengu with no chance of reincarnation?
Regardless of which it is, it seems that Sutoku Tenno’s wrath still lingers today, as you’ll find in the description on yokai.com. Click below to read more:
