It’s almost October, and if you’re a long-time reader of this website, you know what that means: A-Yokai-A-Day!

A-Yokai-A-Day is my project where, during the entire month of October, I feature a different yokai illustration on my website each day and tell you a little bit about it. I started this project in 2009 as a way to celebrate Halloween while living in Japan, and to share a little bit of the folklore of the country I was living in with the internet.

Since then, the project has spawned two books (The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons and The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits), a Patreon project, and yokai.com. It’s been a wonderfully fun project every year, and I love the challenge of introducing so many new yokai to people in such a short time during Halloween season.

Over the years the project has evolved a little bit. Instead of posting all of the yokai descriptions here on matthewmeyer.net, in recent years I have been posting the yokai writeups on yokai.com and go into a meta discussion here on this blog. So on this site I’ll post about my research and translation process, the creation process of the image, why I selected certain yokai to do, and other stories about the creation of each entry. On yokai.com I’ll post the actual entries for each yokai, so for those of you who want to go straight to the meat of the substance without the appetizer, you can head straight to yokai.com to read.

I’m really excited for the project and I hope you are too. There’s only a few more days to go! And remember, you can help support this project year-round by becoming a backer of my project on Patreon!

Thanks to everyone who came by my booth at Baltimore Comic Con! The convention was totally awesome! It was great to see so many new and familiar faces, and to chat about yokai with all of you.

I realized too late that I have been posting all of my updates on Facebook rather than my blog (shame on me!). I should have made a post before going, and I definitely should have done one back during Wizard World Comic Con in Philadelphia earlier this year. I forget that not everyone seems my Facebook and Twitter posts, so I am forcing myself to do this quick update first thing after getting back home and unpacking the car.

One of the most common questions I get at conventions and fairs is if I have such-and-such print. I try hard to bring extra copies of all the popular prints, but I have so many yokai painted that I can’t be prepared with everyone’s favorite yokai. Sadly there are always a few people who come to me after I’ve sold the print they want, or they want one that doesn’t normally get requested, so I don’t have a copy with me. It’s sad, because I absolutely love it when someone comes up to me and asks for a yokai that nobody ever asks for! They are all so unique, and it warms my heart when one of the less popular creatures is called out by name by someone who wants it. So I try, and I wish I could be prepared for every request, but logistically that’s not possible. (The reason I don’t use Etsy much anymore is the same—I have well over 200 yokai paintings and it’s impossible to keep them all available all the time.)

So if you’re one of these folks who couldn’t get the print you wanted, you can email me to let me know which one you want, and I can ship it to you. I can make prints of any of the illustrations on this website, or yokai.com, or in my books. If you know exactly what you want, you can send me the link the yokai.com page, or if you can’t remember which one it was you can describe it to me and I’ll help figure out what you’re looking for.

Thanks again for a great convention weekend!