I’m happy to announce another upcoming exhibition and yokai event. This summer, during Obon, Yokai Fes is once again taking place at Happiring in Fukui City. And like last year, Mononoke Ichi will be there!

Mononoke Ichi has always been a massive hit down in Kyoto, where it is held several times per year. Although art market events like this are rather new to Fukui compared with big cities like Kyoto, the success of last year’s event makes me hopeful that this year will be even more exciting. In addition to the costumed yokai actors, cosplayers, and art market, there will also be children’s crafts and activities, a ghost story telling event, a haunted tour of Fukui, and an art exhibit featuring my yokai paintings as well as my paintings of local Fukui ghosts and yokai. I’ll be there every day, promoting my books and paintings and my upcoming Kickstarter project.

So if you’re in the area August 13-17, come to central Fukui and see the city’s largest yokai event! You won’t want to miss it!

Hello readers. I am very excited that I can finally announce my next big Kickstarter project that I have been working on for the past 3 years. This project is Echizen-Wakasa Kidan: Strange Tales from Fukui.

Unlike my previous 5 Kickstarters, this book is not an encyclopedia. Instead, it is a collection of folktales from here in Fukui Prefecture. During the Edo period this prefecture was the two provinces of Echizen and Wakasa. The stories in this book feature yokai, ghosts, and strange phenomena that took place in these provinces. They were collected from Edo period books, and this is the first time that most of these stories have been told in more than 150 years!

This project seeks to preserve and promote the local folklore of Fukui. We’re producing two translations of this book: one in modern Japanese and one in English, so that people in Japan and all over the world can enjoy these unique and rare folktales.

We’re also partnering with local artisans who are experts in Fukui’s traditional crafts. Fukui has been a center of papermaking and lacquerware for more than 1500 years, as well as candlemaking since the middle ages. In addition to the book, we’re producing unique yokai goods using these ancient techniques that have been handed down from generation to generation.

The Kickstarter is schedule to start this fall, and I will have more details to share during the next few months. In the meantime, you can sign up to be notified as soon as the Kickstarter launches at this link. There are special rewards for early bird and return backers, so make sure to sign up so you don’t miss out on those!

I’m excited to announce the first of several exhibitions of my work that will be taking place in Fukui and Ishikawa Prefectures this year.

The first one coming up is an exhibition at Rennyo Shonin Memorial, in Awara City. This location is exciting both as a historical site and as the location of a famous yokai story known as the yōme odoshi nikutsuki men, in which a woman puts on a demon mask and it fuses with her flesh, turning her into an oni.

My work will be exhibited side by side with some amazing local relics, including the mask itself, as well as several famous ghost scrolls and other ghost and yokai-themed artworks. It is such an honor to have my own work shown side by side with such famous and historic works as these.

The exhibition takes place from June 18 through September 15, so if you’re in Fukui during that time please stop by and see the exhibition!

I’ve been pretty quiet on this blog for the past few months, but that’s because I’ve been very busy behind the scenes with several of big projects and exhibitions that weren’t ready to be made public. Fortunately I am able to share one of them now!

This July, I have a new book coming out here in Japan, published by Kasama Shoin. The World’s Most Beautiful Yokai is a bilingual English-Japanese book featuring 60 some of my most popular yokai illustrations over the past 16 years. The yokai have been selected from my 5 published yokai encyclopedias, as well as several that have not yet been published in any book.

Readers of my other encyclopedias will be familiar with the format, which divides the yokai into six chapters based on location: houses, cities, fields, mountains, seas and rivers, and the otherworld. Each yokai is accompanied by a description in both Japanese and English, so it’s a great choice for yokai fans who are also studying a foreign language!

You can read more about the book at Kasama Shoin’s website, and you can pre-order it now from Amazon, or pick it up at your local book store this July.