MatthewMeyer.net

illustrations, folklore, and blog

A-Yokai-A-Day: Nodeppou

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Matt

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!

Jigoku: Japanese Hell

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Matt

Last week I wrote about about Meido, the Japanese Underworld, and how it has roots in Indian Buddhism and Chinese Buddhist-Taoist concepts. Today I’ll write a little bit about where some unlucky souls go after Meido: to Jigoku, or Japanese Hell.

Jigoku, like Meido, is a complicated topic. As with Meido, just about every tradition has a slightly different concept of Jigoku, with minor tweaks and variations on very similar themes. Jigoku is pretty similar to the traditional Buddhist concept of hell (usually called naraka), and very similar to the Chinese concept of diyu. Folks who know about Buddhist cosmology will probably find a lot of familiar concepts here, though there are some differences, such as the ranking of human realm above the asura realm.

Another interesting thing is that some traditional Shinto-based Japanese concepts do not seem to have been incorporated into Japanese Buddhism. For example, while many local kami were made into Buddhist figures by the theory of honji suijaku, yokai never really became a big part of Buddhism. The Shinto underworld, Yomi, doesn’t really get much treatment at all in Buddhism. Monsters like tengu, while traditionally depicted as being the great enemy of Buddhism, remain separate from Buddhist cosmology, and exist outside of the circle of reincarnation. But that starts to diverge from today’s topic — Jigoku — so let’s take a closer look at what Hell is like in Japan, continuing from where we left off last week with Meido… Continue reading →

Meido: The Japanese Underworld

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Matt

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 →

December-January Japan Trip

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Matt

My wife’s brother happened to get married in December, which provided us the perfect excuse to go back to Japan for a short trip. With the Christmas and New Years holidays around the corner as well, it made sense to extend the vacation a bit and spend the whole month in Japan. This was awesome not only for the wedding, but because I got to spend my birthday, Christmas, and New Years (the absolute BEST Japanese holiday) in Japan, as well as having the chance to tour around and do some yokai research and collect visual reference for my next book. Continue reading →

Yokai Museum

Posted on November 10, 2013 by Matt

One of the reasons that I wrote The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons a few years ago is that there are so few books in English that deal with Japanese monsters, and of the ones that do exist there are so few that really give them the treatment that they deserve. Fortunately, yokai have been growing in popularity over the last couple of years, and finally some very interesting English-language books have begun to come out. Yokai Museum is one of these, having just been released in the US last month. I got my hands on a copy the other day, and I thought I would introduce it on my blog.

Yokai Museum is just what it sounds like: a museum of yokai-themed artwork spanning hundreds of years of history, condensed into book format. All of these works come from the vast collection of Yumoto Koichi — yokai researcher, professor, and former curatorial director of the Kawasaki City Museum. The Yumoto Koichi collection is the world’s largest collection of yokai-related art, and while Yokai Museum doesn’t come close to covering the 3,000 items in the Yumoto Koichi collection, it does cover an impressive selection of more than 161 pieces, detailed in high quality full color photos. The 288 page book is bilingual, featuring English translations side-by-side with the Japanese text, making it doubly useful as a language study tool for anyone looking to practice their Japanese (or English, for that matter). The descriptions are written with people who are not intimately familiar with yokai in mind, so they don’t require much foreknowledge to enjoy (and it is primarily a picture book, with only small written parts, like the tags you would see at a museum on the wall next to a piece).

Yokai Museum is divided into six chapters covering various formats of yokai art that appeared over time: picture scrolls, books, woodblock prints, games, everyday items, and religious items. Chapter 1: Picture Scrolls – A Cast of Colorful Yokai begins with the oldest known piece of true yokai art: the Hyakki Yagyō Emaki scroll attributed to Tosa Mitsunobu. It then shows a large number of other scrolls, including detailed close ups, and goes over the history and development of the styles used in these paintings. Chapter 2: The World of Yokai Books starts with Toriyama Sekien’s Gazu Hyakki Yagyō and moves on to the “yellow cover” books and other kusazoshi printed material from the Edo period. Chapter 3: Nishiki-e – A World of Gorgeous Color features the beautiful and colorful woodblock prints from the golden age of ukiyoe. Images by Hokusai, Yoshitoshi, and other masters are included alongside other less well-known pieces. Pictures of Edo period color newspapers, large format tryptichs, advertisements, and other old images are beautifully reproduced here. Chapter 4: Yokai Games is full of toys and games of all kinds from the Edo period up until the Showa period. There are illustrated board games, card games, fold-up paper models, kamishibai, and beautiful, strangely crafted mechanical wooden toys that would probably give any kid today nightmares! Chapter 5: Yokai Lurking in Everyday Life contains pictures of everyday items including kimono, obi, and other clothes, dishes, bottles, netsuke, even knife handles and sword guards. Chapter 6: Yokai and Prayer features a large number of votive cards that feature illustrations of various yokai on them. There are also works of art with religious significance which once belonged to various temples.

I was surprised at just how pervasive the yokai influence actually got to be. While I have long been a fan of the old prints and paintings from the Edo period, this was the first time I had ever seen yokai-themed kimonos, and that just blew me away! And while I had seen yokai paintings, prints, and netsuke, before, the votive cards and toys that were created over a hundred years ago (and look like they could have been made today) were amazing.

My next book won’t be out until late next year, so if you are looking for some great yokai material to tide you over until then — particularly if you are interested in the artistic origins of yokai imagery — this is the book to get! Grab it on Amazon.com!

Yokai Museum is published by PIE International.

A-Yokai-A-Day 2013 Line-Up

Posted on November 4, 2013 by Matt

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 →

A-Yokai-A-Day: Shiryō

Posted on October 31, 2013 by Matt

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.