Try saying that three times fast!

Rokujō no Miyasundokoro is an interesting name. From it we can tell a little bit about her. Those of you familiar with Kyoto will know that the town is divided into numbered neighborhoods (Ichijō, Nijō, Sanjō, Shijō, Gojō, Rokujō, Shichijō, Hachijō, Kujō, and Jūjō). You will probably recognize that her name means “6th street,” giving you an idea as to where she lived. The name Miyasundokoro starts with the kanji 御, which denotes a high rank; however, it is not the highest rank. In fact, her name (御息所) actually means “the place where the emperor sleeps.” It basically means “she who sleeps with the emperor.” In otherwords, she was one of many imperial concubines. Technically married to the emperor, and technically an aristocrat, she was not as high ranking as she might have wanted to be, and she would have been constantly competing with other wives for the favor of the court.

Lady Rokujō (I’ll call her that so you don’t have to keep trying to pronounce her name in your head as you read) is actually a character from Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji. This book hold an extremely important position in Japanese literature. It was the first novel ever written (in the world, not just in Japan), it is considered one of the greatest works of classical Japanese literature, and it was written by a woman. To get an understanding of it’s significance, it is considered to be as important to Japan and the Japanese language as The Canterbury Tales is to England and English.

Murasaki Shikibu is something of an adopted daughter of my “hometown” in Japan, Echizen city. Her father was appointed to a government position there, so she moved to Echizen from Kyoto along with him. Although she hated Echizen and wrote poems about how miserable she was an wanted to return home, the town loves her anyway. Actually, scholars think that some of the scenes in her works were inspired by her life in Fukui, so that makes her work of particular interest to me anyway.

Lady Rokujō’s chief rival in The Tale of Genji is a woman named Lady Aoi. In Japanese, her name is written Aoi no Ue. Ue means “up” and was actually a title denoting a certain societal position, just as Lady Rokujō’s name was. Japanese readers of The Tale of Genji can get this little bit of extra information about the characters, which is totally lost in translation when they are just written as “Lady Aoi” and “Lady Rokujō.” This is just one of the many complicated ways that English and Japanese differ from each other.

Anyway, before I digress too much about linguistics and Heian period court rankings, let’s get to today’s yokai:

click me! click me!

Today’s yokai continues the theme of angry beautiful women. While we looked at the general concept of “hannya” yesterday, today we look at a specific hannya—the most famous one, in fact.

Kiyo-hime is what is known as a honnari hannya. They are the most powerful kind. Not only did she grow scary horns and develop magical powers, she pretty much entirely turned into a dragon.

Kiyo-hime is actually pretty interesting because of how famous her story it. The legend was adapted into a noh play which became very famous. There are a number of very old scroll paintings depicting her story as well. One of my favorite ukiyoe artists, Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, also did a fantastic print of her, which you can see on the Wikipedia entry for Kiyo-hime.

Anyway, here is my take on Kiyo-hime. Click for the story:

Today’s yokai is a famous one that you have probably heard of or seen at one time or another. Those famous demon masks that are so iconic of Japanese demons come from this one. Movies like Onibaba, and many forms of Japanese theater and arts utilize this today. Today we look at the hannya!

There’s not much to say about this besides what is written in the main post. However, this post will serve as an interlude into the next couple of posts, which will all feature specific hannya. Enjoy!

click to visit yokai.com!

For today’s yokai I’m going to pause the “cute but scary women” theme and post a cute but scary bird yokai. This one is in memory of my little Pi-chan, who died this morning. She was 7 years old, and was a loving and playful bird who lived a full and happy life. Here she is helping me paint yokai:

I’ll miss you, Pi-chan!

As for today’s yokai, this is the nyūnai suzume. It’s actually a very special kind of yokai, despite its very ordinary appearance. As you’ll find out from its entry on yokai.com, it is the ghost of a nobleman who died in exile, transformed into a yokai, and then returned to Kyoto to attack those who wronged it. You may think that a sparrow would not be so scary, but the nyūnai suzume struck fear into the hearts of the citizens of Kyoto many centuries ago!

What’s special about this kind of deceased nobleman yokai is that an entire ceremonial religion sprang up around them. Called goryō shinkō, it means “religion of ghosts,” and it shaped the foundations of court life in classical Japan. The entire “science” of onmyōdō, or sorcery, was developed to pursue this religion. The purpose of goryō shinkō is to pacify the ghosts (or onryō) of people who were wronged by the nobility and came back to haunt them.

A good part of The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits is dedicated to goryō shinkō, onmyōdō, and the ghosts connected with this religion. In the book you’ll read about some of Japan’s most famous ghosts and how their worship has helped shape parts of Japanese culture that can still be felt today.

Anyway, on to today’s scarier-than-it-looks yokai!

Nyuunaisuzume / 入内雀 / にゅうないすずめ

Read the full entry at yokai.com!

I’ve been a bit late with a few recent yokai posts, so I thought I would put today’s up a bit early to make up for time!

There’s something really fun about the beautiful-young-women yokai that I think everyone enjoys. I’m not sure what it is, but perhaps the juxtaposition of beauty and horror. Even though it’s easy to look back at the older Japanese ghost stories, where women are regarded as untrustworthy and sinful, and accuse them of being horribly sexist and unbalanced (all very true, of course), we still seem enchanted by them today. Even horror movies seem to follow suit, with creepy nappy haired girls being a common trope these days. Whatever the cultural fascination with female ghosts is, it doesn’t seem to be going away at all…

I especially love tonight’s yokai, not just because it’s another cute girl yokai, but because of all the puns included with it. I’ve written about Toriyama Sekien’s puns many times before, and this is a prime example of a pun-filled yokai. Click the image for the full story and the explanation of the puns.

And remember, if you enjoy my yokai explanations and illustrations, pick up my book on Amazon.com, and stay tuned for my next book coming out this winter!

Those of you who have been following my Facebook page since the winter probably have seen a number of these photos before, as I have been sharing them as I have been painting them. However, this is the first time you’ve seen them with the accompanying text of course!

Today’s yokai was a request from a fan. It sticks out in my mind because last winter when I visited Japan to do some yokai research I saw a lot of tsubaki trees. I was visiting Matsue, the small town in Shimane where the immortal Koizumi Yakumo (aka Lafcadio Hearn) made his home. I was tracing one of his favorite routes, down a street to a small, secluded Inari shrine which he used to visit and which supposedly inspired one or two of his stories, when I noticed the beautiful flowers all along the road. Their name stuck out at me: tsubaki. Then I realized, isn’t there a tsubaki yokai??? Yes of course! Furutsubaki no rei, or the ghost of the old tsubaki tree!

I went home and researched that yokai, but the blossoms of those trees, which bloom in the winter and are thus called the winter rose, still stand out in my memory. I guess it’s fate that I should be inspired about yokai stories on the same road that Lafcadio Hearn walked down to receive inspiration about yokai stories some 100 years ago!

Anyway, here is today’s yokai:

Today’s yokai is sort of an epilogue to the chimimōryō we looked at these past two days. Jami is actually a subset of chimi, being another generic term for monsters. The mi in jami is the same mi as in chimi, but the ja denotes wickedness. So these are also chimi, but these are the extra bad chimi.

Head on over to yokai.com to read the full entry on jami!