It’s finally here! October, that is, and along with it, A-Yokai-A-Day!

For those of you not familiar with this project, let me briefly explain the history behind this and what I will be doing:

Back in 2009, I had been living in Japan for a couple of years and wanted to start an art project to introduce some of the really amazing stories and folklore that I had heard in my rural area which probably were not well known outside of Japan. At that time, they really weren’t many books on Japanese folklore, and information on the internet was sparse and unreliable at best. So I started a project during October to paint one new painting of a traditional Japanese monster every day as a way to bring some Japanese culture to my readers as well as celebrate Halloween in my own little way, by surrounding myself with ghosts, monsters, and horror.

After doing that for a few years, and discovering that there is actually quite a large audience for Japanese folklore, I began work on The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, my first book about Japanese monsters. It was crowdfunded by over 400 people, many of whom were fans of my yokai illustrations on my blog. That led to my second book, The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits, which was similarly crowdfunded and published this year. Throughout those projects, I remained dedicated to posting a yokai every day during the month of October, and in 2013 I created yokai.com and started up a yokai database featuring the yokai from my books and from A-Yokai-A-Day. Through my books and website, I hope to share the really awesome world of Japanese folklore and monsters with the world, providing translations of Japanese folk tales that have rarely or never been translated into English before.

Both this website and yokai.com are supported by yokai lovers through Patreon, where fans pledge $1 per month to support my continued work on bringing yokai to the world. If you like what you see this month, please consider supporting me by either buying my books, or joining my Patreon project so I can continue to create artwork and translations.

During A-Yokai-A-Day, I will post a new entry to the database on yokai.com. Here on matthewmeyer.net, I talk about the behind-the-scenes work, either interesting facts about the yokai that didn’t make it into the entry on yokai.com, or stories about the creation of the piece, or even just interesting facts about Japanese folklore. In a way, yokai.com is slightly more encyclopedic in nature, while this site is more bloggish(?).

Now that I think I’ve said enough about the project, on to today’s yokai!

Tanuki tsuki

I usually like to start A-Yokai-A-Day off with some cuter, tamer yokai, and build up to the scarier ones closer to Halloween. Fortunately in Japanese folklore, there is no shortage of semi-cute or charming monsters. The word in Japanese for this is kimokawaii, a portmanteau of kimochi warui and kawaii. It basically means “creepy cute” and is a great word for describing many yokai!

Tanuki tsuki is a great example of kimokawaii. The idea of a cute little animal possessing a person is both charming and disturbing at the same time. On the surface, it is quite silly, but when you hear about all of the things that happens to these possession victims, it can be quite disturbing! My goal with this painting was to capture the cuteness in the illustration, and capture the creepiness in the description. Click on the painting below to visit yokai.com and read the full entry!

You can read more about tanuki tsuki and other strange Japanese folk tales in my new book The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits. Order it now from Amazon.com.

Greetings, yokai fans!

Long-time readers will probably already have the date marked on their calendars, but it’s that time of year again! Time for my annual tradition: A-Yokai-A-Day for the month of October!

As always, I will try to bring you at least a few monsters which have never appeared in an English translation before, so whether you are new to Japanese monsters or a long-time fan who has read every book out there, there should be something for everyone to enjoy! Like in previous years, I’ll be posting the “official” yokai entries over on yokai.com, and talking more about the production of the images and research processes on this blog.

This year promises to be another excellent one! I will feature select yokai from my new book The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits (published this summer thanks to the support of over 400 Kickstarter backers) as well as a number of new yokai chosen by my yokai patrons over at Patreon!

Speaking of my Patreon project, it’s been just over one month since it launched, and in that time my patrons have supported the creation of four new yokai entries!

If you like yokai and want to see more, you can become a yokai patron too! Even just $1 per month helps me to continue making new illustrations year-round and not just during October!

So, bookmark your calendar, set your alarms, cancel all of your plans: A-Yokai-A-Day is coming October 1st!

Hello Readers!

It’s been a while since I’ve done a big update on the blog. Most of my updates over the past year have been geared towards the Kickstarter backers and done through that website, which has the unfortunate consequence of leaving my own website fairly barren.

Now that The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits is finished and published, I can finally share my next project with everybody, and I can do it on my own blog!

I have just launched a Patreon project at patreon.com/osarusan to create more yokai. Patreon is like Kickstarter, but instead of pledging a lump sum to get a book after a year, you pledge a small monthly contribution, like a tip, in order for me to continuously create work.

Through the Patreon project I am going to create a few yokai per month, which I will upload up to yokai.com, free for everyone to read. Backers will get regular yokai updates with new yokai posts and illustrations during this project, exactly like I did with my Kickstarters, and like I do during A-Yokai-A-Day. So if you would like to get regular yokai updates, please sign up! There are a number of small rewards at the various patron levels, too. You can sign up at patreon.com/osarusan.

Happy Halloween, yokai fans! The best day of the year is finally here! Is anyone dressing up as a yokai for Halloween? I have a kappa costume, and my wife is dressing up as a shishimai (which the mujina is wearing in this illustration).

Because Halloween is the whole purpose of A-Yokai-A-Day, I always save the most special yokai of the project for the final day. Today’s yokai is actually a pair of yokai; a father-daughter team, straight out of the legends. Taira no Masakado is one of the most famous figures in Japanese history, feared as a terrible ghost, and worshiped as a god to appease his anger. His daughter, Takiyasha-hime, was a powerful witch herself. What is more fitting for Halloween than a vengeful ghost and a witch? I don’t know!

These ones are bit long, too, so they should make for interesting reads. To read on, click the illustrations below!

…and don’t forgot, there are still a few hours left to buy my book, The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, for only $1!

Greetings everyone! It’s October 30th! That means it’s Mischief Night for all of you living in and around New Jersey, and just an ordinary day for all of you other folks. (I only recently learned that this is not a country-wide thing… how odd!)

I just got back from Night of Terror, a haunted hayride nearby, and boy was it fun! It also really put me in the mood for Halloween. There’s nothing at all like a good old fashioned haunted hayride. Aside from that though, the next best thing is of course ghost stories! And after watching a few of my favorite ghost movies, I am very much in the mood to post a ghost for today’s A-Yokai-A-Day. So here you are, for the day before Halloween, a ghost:

Today’s yokai comes by request again. This one is another truly, truly bizarre one.

It cracks me up, it really does. There’s little else I can say about it. It is so bizarre, and so out there, and the intricate story that Toriyama Sekien wove when he created it is just mind-boggling.

I have spoken at length about Toriyama Sekien, and his amazing ability to write puns, as well as his amazing ability to poke scathing fun at things he considered immoral in his time: prostitution, religion, and homosexuality. This piece is of course no different. But I think it speaks for itself, so I will let you go on to read the article itself.

Oh, one more thing that fans might find interesting: the painting on the byobu in my illustration is actually taken from Toriyama Sekien’s second book, which serves as the inspiration for my second book. The illustrations you see there are “omagatoki” (i.e. the hour of meeting evil spirits) and “hinode” (sunrise) which are the opening and closing entries in my next book. Just a little fun fact for those of you who like tiny details as much as I do!

Anyway, read on:

Oh, one more thing! From today until Halloween, you can get my first book, The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons, for just $1! Click here to get it!

Today’s yokai was a special request via Facebook: kosenjōbi.

There are lots and lots of fireball-type yokai. Collectively, they are called hinotama. Taking a step back futher, there is a special word in Japanese for supernatural fires: kaika. While researching for this book, part of what I covered was the etymology of the words used to describe evil spirits in Japan. (It also may be partially because I am a word geek and etymology draws me like a moth to a flame) As you might guess, there are countless words!

I’m reminded of the story about how Eskimos and Inuit peoples have dozens and dozens of words for snow because they are surrounded by it. I can only imagine that the reason Japanese has so many words for supernatural creatures is because they have played an important part in Japanese culture for thousands of years. (As a word geek, I am also aware that the Eskimo thing is a myth, but it does support the point I am trying to make so I’m just going to go with it.)

Anyway, here is today’s kaika. Click to read more: