After appearing in the New York Times last week, I was also featured in my hometown’s newspaper—The Retrospect—this week. Though it may not have the prestige of the Times, it’s great little newspaper that I grew up reading, and I am really happy to be featured in it!
This week’s Sunday edition of the New York Times has an article about the recent resurgence (or just surgence? Not sure if it’s a “re”) of yokai popularity in America. I was really excited to be mentioned by name, as well as having my artwork featured pretty prominently in the paper. The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits was also mentioned!
My Shiisaa painting made the front page of the Arts & Leisure section!
It’s been deathly quiet on this blog since the start of my 2nd Kickstarter. The reason for that is that I have been posting all of the progress and updates on the book work on the Kickstarter page for backers’ eyes only. Since the book has been taking up all of my time for the past year and a half or so, matthewmeyer.net has been suffering from a bit of neglect.
Well, Halloween is over (sadly), and we have to wait 364 days until the happiest day of the year again. However, just because A-Yokai-A-Day is over doesn’t mean that I am finished painting yokai! I’ll continue posting my new paintings on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, but you’ll have to wait for the book to read all about them. So make sure that you are following me on social media, and you’ll get to preview some of the artwork from my upcoming second yokai encyclopedia: The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits.
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!
Taira no Masakado / 平将門 / たいらのまさかど
Takiyasha-hime / 滝夜叉姫 / たきやしゃひめ
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:
Goryō / 御霊 / ごりょう
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:
Ookaburo / 大禿 / おおかぶろ
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!