Happy New Year, everyone!

I’m a bit behind on this final December yokai due to the hardware failure earlier this month. But I just finished her and wanted to share. I will put a longer writeup on yokai.com a little later.

This is kitsune tsuki, or fox possession. We looked at myobu and Kuzunoha, two examples of good foxes… well kitsune tsuki is done by bad foxes. They possess people, causing sickness or mental illness. In fact, up until modern medicine was introduced to Japan, many illness were blamed on foxes! And virtually all mental illness was blamed on them!

Foxes can possess the weak-minded, and are especially good at possessing women (yes, Japanese folklore is very sexist). They enter through a number of places, particularly under the finger nails. There is a long laundry list of symptoms, and the long and short of it is that you need an onmyoji to get the fox spirit out of you.

—

I will be posting a January yokai plan soon, so if you have any yokai you’d like to see, please leave a comment here. Otherwise, you can leave it up to me and I will choose some fun ones! 🙂 I’ll post the hi-res files separately, and I will post again when the writeup for this one is on yokai.com.

Happy New Year!

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

葛の葉
くずのは

TRANSLATION: kudzu leaves
ALTERNATE NAMES: Shinodazuma (the Wife of Shinoda)

ORIGIN: Kuzunoha is a byakko, or white kitsune. She is most famous for being the wife of Abe no Yasuna and the mother of Abe no Seimei. Her story is preserved in a number of kabuki and bunraku plays. The Inari shrine near where Abe no Yasuna first met Kuzunoha still stands today, and is popularly known as the Kuzunoha Shrine.

LEGENDS: During the reign of Emperor Murakami (946—967 CE), the onmyōji Abe no Yasuna sought to rebuild his family house. The Abe family had once been a rich and powerful one, but their land and status were lost years before by Yasuna’s father, who had been tricked by con men. While rebuilding his house, Yasuna regularly traveled to the Inari shrine in Shinoda, Izumi Province, to pray for the god’s blessings.

One day, while walking through the woods of Shinoda, a beautiful white fox jumped in front of Yasuna’s path. It was being chased by a hunter, and it asked Yasuna to save it. Yasuna knew that white foxes were holy to Inari, and he helped the creature to escape. Shortly afterwards, the hunter came to where Yasuna was and the two got into a fight. Yasuna was wounded in the fight, and fell to the ground.

After the hunter left, a young woman came out of the forest to Yasuna’s side. She told him her name was Kuzunoha. She took Yasuna all the way back to his home, and nursed him back to health. The woman continued to visit Yasuna, caring for him and checking up on his recovery. At some point during her visits, Kuzunoha and Yasuna had fallen in love, and so when he was better they got married.

Eventually Kuzunoha became pregnant, and she bore Yasuna a son. They three of them lived happily for some time. However, when their son was five years old, he witnessed something strange. Some say it was when she looked in a mirror, others say it was while she was sleeping; but his mother accidentally let her true form appear for a brief second: she a white-furred kitsune!

Her secret having been discovered, Kuzunoha had no choice but to leave her beloved family. Holding a brush in her mouth, she wrote a farewell tanka on the paper door and vanished:

If you love me, come and visit, in the forest of Shinoda in Izumi, the resentful kudzu leaf

When Yasuna read her poem, he realized that his beloved wife was the fox whom he had saved years earlier. He and their son traveled to the forests of Shinoda, where Kuzunoha had first entered the world of humankind. There, Kuzunoha appeared before them one last time. She presented them a crystal ball and a golden box as parting gifts, and then she left her human family forever.

Kuzunoha and Yasuna’s son grew up to become a powerful sorcerer, thanks to the magical gifts his mother had given him, her yōkai lineage, and his father’s onmyōji training. He took the name Abe no Seimei, and became the most powerful onmyōji in all of Japanese history.

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.

Become a Patron!

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! 🙂

Now, on to today’s yokai:

苦笑

にがわらい

TRANSLATION: bitter smile

HABITAT: inhabited areas

DIET: hatred and ill-feelings

APPEARANCE: Nigawarai are large, ugly yokai with horns and green-tinged, hairy bodies. They wear dirty rags. Their hairy mouths are twisted into what looks like a forced smile. Their hands end in sharp, poisonous claws, which is powerful enough to paralyze small animals.

BEHAVIOR: Nigawarai are created out of the ill feelings of human beings—particularly, feelings of ill-humor and forced, feigned amusement. As their name suggests, they are connected with the “bitter smiles” that people make when trying to hide their feelings of discomfort. They cause ill-will, disgust and encourage arguments. They both feed off of and spread these negative feelings in the people around them.

INTERACTIONS: When used in cooking, the poison from a nigawarai’s claws makes food terribly bitter. However, it has the ability to cure stomach pain, making nigawarai a useful yōkai for medicinal purposes.

ORIGIN: The earliest references to nigawarai go back to the Muromachi period, where they appear in monster scrolls. These paintings appeared without description, so the original intent of the artist in describing this yōkai is unknown. Over the centuries, nigawarai continued to appear in other monster scrolls, and through the work of numerous artists eventually developed the traits that they are known for today.

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! 🙂

Sketches and line art are attached to the bottom of this post. Hi-res files will be in a separate post for the $5+ backers.

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.

脛擦り
すねこすり

TRANSLATION: shin rubber
ALTERNATE NAMES: sunekkorogashi, sunekkorobashi, sunekajiri
HABITAT: inhabited areas
DIET: omnivorous

APPEARANCE: Sunekosuri are small, mischievous spirits from Okayama Prefecture. They appear on rainy nights in streets and alleys where people travel. They are most often described as dog-like in appearance, though they are also occasionally said to resemble cats.

INTERACTIONS: Sunekosuri run up behind people walking on dark, rainy nights. They rub against their shins, weave in and out of their legs, nuzzle against the knees, and otherwise make it difficult to walk. They do not intentionally cause any harm to humans, although occasionally their rubbing is strong enough to make a person stumble or even knock them down.

A few local of the local variations are slightly more aggressive than the sunekosuri. The sunekkorogashi and sunekkorobashi both mean “shin toppler.” The sunekajiri means “shin biter.” Although not as violent as other kinds of yōkai, these spirits are blamed for the occasional bruise or bloody nose.

ORIGIN: Sunekosuri is a relatively modern yōkai. It did not appear in writing until the 1935 yokai encyclopedia Genkō Zenkoku Yōkai Jiten, although it is impossible to tell how far back oral traditions go. Despite its relative recentness, it is a fairly well-known and well-loved yokai, most likely due to its cute depictions and manga and film.