Japan monster history reading response

42 YOKAI CULTURE

other the brawn-working together to rid the capital of a troublesome monster.

Tales of Raiko are found in various sources, including the "Book of Swords" (Tsurugi no maki) section of Heike monogatari (The Tale of the Heike), various otogizoshi, Noh drama, and Kabuki. In addition to con- quering Shuten doji, Raiko is also the hero of the Tsuchigumo-zoshi, men- tioned earlier. This picture-scroll narrative recounts a journey of Raiko and his faithful companion, Watanabe no Tsuna, one of four trusty retainers. Raika and Tsuna come across a dilapidated old house, where they encoun- ter all sorts of yokai, including a 290-year-old woman, a nun with a gargan- tuan face, a sixty-meter-tall oni, a kitsune fox, and some random tsuku- mogami, In the end, they finally meet up with the gigantic earth spider, which Raika dulybeheads.19 . Legends about Raiko nicely complement legends about Seimei. Raiko 1S the brawny, visceral warrior who conquers his enemies with his strength and his sword. Seimei, on the other hand, is the mystical, divining, intel- lectual counterpart who exerts power over others through knowledge, magic, and the strength of his secrets spells. Together these yokai-hunting heroes neatly reflect the duality of event and object inherent in the very concept of yokai: while Seimei divines the mysterious phenomenon, Raiko fights the weird body.

WEIRD TALES AND WEIRD TASTES

The Tokugawa, or Eda period, from around 1600 to 1868, was a time of great dynamism and change in Japan. Without oversimplifying a span of almos~ three centuries, we can say that during this period the disparate domams of the Japanese islands were, relatively speaking, united as one country through a complex system of oversight with a strong military gov- ernment based in Edo (present-day Tokyo) and a weak but symbolically meaningful emperor in Kyoto. It was a period of comparative peace and rigid social order, often enforced by government suppression. Cities expanded rapidly: by 1700 the population of Edo was greater than that of either Paris or London at the time, making it one of the largest metropoli- tan centers in the world.20

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 43

As people converged from communities all over Japan, urban centers such as Eda and Osaka became dynamic sites of cultural exchange and creativity. The Eda period witnessed the rise of Kabuki drama and ning;y6 joru:ri puppet theater (generally called bunraku today). Along with these dramatic arts, there developed a massive publishing industry that pro- duced ukiyoe woodblock prints (the movie posters of their day) and printed thousands of relatively inexpensive books, many of which were filled with color and black-and-white images, making them the equivalent of today's manga and popular literature. Not surprisingly, yokai also pro- liferated during this period of vibrant cultural activity, finding new homes in the world of commercial art, popular literature, and drama. At the same time, they remained part of local culture-still thriving in folktales and legends. As literary scholar Sumie Jones puts it, "One of the intersections between the high and the low was a taste for the weird."21

Spooky Tales: Hyaku-monogatari nff8~a

One way in which yokai from local rural communities made their way onto a more national (or regional) urban stage was through a practice called hyaku-monogatari. These were gatherings at which spooky stories, called kaidan, were exchanged one after another with the intent ofinduc- ing a supernatural experience. The procedure was simple: people would gather in a large room, sometimes in a temple or other semipublic venue, and tell short, spooky stories or anecdotes about ghosts, yokai, or mysteri- ous occurrences. After each brief tale, a lantern or candle would be extin- guished. At the end of the final story, the room would be plunged into complete darkness. And then, it was said (or hoped or feared), a real y<>kai would appear. Buddhist priest and author Asai Ryoi (d. 1691) explains, "It is said that when you collect and tell one hundred stories of scary or strange things that have been passed down since long ago, something scary or strange is certain to occur."22

The word hyaku-monogatari literally means "one hundred stories; but the number one hundred was not necessarily taken literally. In fact, most hyaku-monogatari collections include fewer than a hundred tales. In one sense, the implication was simply that this was a very large number. 23 The particular number one hundred (hyaku), however, also had symbolic

YOKAI CULTURE

implications for the mysterious. As mentioned earlier, tsukumogami refers to inanimate objects transformed into yokai after reaching the magic age of one hundred. Similarly, one hundred was often cited as the age after which a normal fox, cat, or tanuki might turn into a yokai. One hundred seems to have signified a transformative or liminal point- beyond the nonnal life span of an object or living thing but not so high as to be completely out of reach. One hundred was the number after which things might get a little unusual. The practice of hyaku-monogatari reflects this · . . prenuse: after a certam pomt-after the one hundredth story-you w · ere ma space in which the mundane and the normal could be transcended.

Hyaku-monogatari called kimo- . su:posedly got its start as a test of bravery, a s~-

Wh th dameshi, or challenge of the liver," undertaken by samurai.

e er th" · 15 15 true or not, by the early part of the Edo period hyaku- monogatari gath . .

ermgs seem to have become a popular form of entertam- ment and a liv l ti . e Y venue for the performance and exchange of oral narra- ves. Some of th

. ese were based on local legends, others were personal expenences or m . oth emorates, some came from Chinese literature, and still

ers may have be . tal , . . en invented expressly for the game.24 Whatever the

es ongms how lIIl . ' ever, as people publicly shared and performed them, the

ages and attributes . . . d th

of mdiVIdual yokai were enhanced and developed, an ese yokai took

G. h on more concrete forms IVen t e vibr Ii · . . . ant terary and artistic world of the time, it is also not

surpnsmg that publish ta · ll . ers soon began to gather and sell hyaku-monoga-n co ections 2s Th S · e collections varied greatly in length and content. ome were dedicated . . . th not to telhng mysterious tales but to explammg e reasons for such h . Kok h ku

P enomena. This was the case most famously with on ya -mono t "h . d iga arz yoban ofl686 which offered the interpretive

WIS om, mostly bas d . ' . (l631_1672

). e on ym-yang principles, of Yamaoka Gennn

Although the 0 al . r practice of hyaku-monogatari started to go out of vogue around the mid-170 . . . .

fl . h . Os, publication of written collections contmued

to ouns · m fact th kaid ' ' e an form also became part of high literature, most notably with th 1776 . . . e publication of Ueda Akinari's Ugetsu monoga- tari (Ta/,es of Moonl" ht nd . . . . zg a Razn).26 Though not exphc1tly a hyaku- monogatari text this f II . ' amous co ection of nine spooky tales (some based on

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 45

Chinese stories) was considered a masterpiece of beautiful writing and eerie atmospherics and neatly reflected the popular fascination with the weird.

Picturing Yokai: Emaki

So far, I have focused primarily on written records ofyokai and their sub- duers. But, particularly during the Muromachi period, yokai started to proliferate in visual form as well, appearing primarily in emaki (picture scroIIs or hand rolls): long, horizontal rolls of paper or silk that could be unfurled to show a series of events, often, though not always, with accom- panying text. Many otogizoshi, such as the one concerning the tsuchi- gumo, were produced in this visual form.

But it was the first known Hyakkiyagy6 emaki that really set the stage for a proliferation of yokai illustrations. This picture scroll by Tosa Mitsunobu, often called the Shinjuanbon version, seems to have started (or at least been an early part of) a veritable hyakkiyagyo "boom; in which all sorts of different yokai were pictured in numerous scrolls produced in a range of styles. 27 In most cases, these yokai are portrayed with humor, a chaotic parade of wacky characters. In fact, the hyakkiyagyo became a sort of artistic genre that continued to be produced, often with clear allusion to earlier versions, throughout the Edo period and even into Meiji. The work of Kawanabe Kyosai (1831-1889) stands out in particular as a bril- liant late incarnation of this tradition.

Tosa Mitsunobu's Shinjuanbon version of the Hyakkiyagyo emaki does not tell a story as such, but the final scene shows the yokai scattering-so there is a hint of a plot. A number of picture scrolls that were painted slightly later, during the Edo period, do not even bother with narrative at all; rather, they unroll to simply reveal one yokai after another, individu- ally depicted, and each one labeled with its name: rokurokubi, yuki-onna, ubume, and so on. Both these facts-that the yokai are shown individually and that they are labeled-suggest that to a certain extent these scrolls may have been made for the purpose of recording information or perhaps even teaching, akin to children's books today. Unfortunately, we do not know the objectives of the artists; but we can think of these scrolls as an early artistic way of documenting yokai, whether intentionally or not-a kind of "natural history record."28

46 YOKAI CULTURE

If we look at some of these scrolls, such as Bakemono zukushi (artist unknown, date unknown) and Hyakkai-zukan (Sawaki Siishi, 1737), we notice that they are populated with all sorts of yokai; but in contrast to the Shinjuanbon Hyakkiyagy6 emaki, they do not feature any household objects. These artists seem interested in documenting a range of folk beliefs beyond the tsukumogami; this would have included legends or descriptions they had heard about yuki-onna, kappa, or other yokai that thrived in rural environments, as opposed to the urban settings where the artists themselves lived. Perhaps tsukumogami-household-object yokai-were a sort of urban-consumer-society yokai, whereas yuki-onna, kappa, and the others were more rural. Or perhaps these scrolls represent a visual supplement to some of the narratives recounted in hyaku-mono- gatari, an illustration of creatures described in oral tale-telling sessions. Although the number one hundred (hyaku) has numerous implications, it also certainly links together hyaku-monogatari and hyakkiyagyo, and it connects both to notions of the otherworld. 29 All this is speculative, but whatever they were intended for, ultimately these emaki demonstrate a taxonomic impulse to isolate and label the individual yokai in the hyakkiyagyo parade.

Documenting Yokai: Encyclopedias

This interest in identifying and naming reflects a broader zeitgeist, a kind of encyclopedic way of thinking about the world. Even while picture scrolls and spooky tale collections were produced and consumed as a form of entertainment, the Edo period was also a time of serious intellectual inquiry, informed especially by a strain of neo-Confucian philosophy known as Shushigaku. Based on the philosophy of Zhu Xi (1130-1200), Shushigaku promoted the "investigation of things" (kakubutsu chichi) in order to understand the structure of nature and the proper order of soci- ety; it was highly influential in intellectual and government circles, lead- ing to the importation of all sorts of natural history texts and pharmaco- poeias from China, and also to research and writing about Japanese plants, animals, and minerals (and all sorts of other things). One product of this broad interest in just about everything was a 105-volume encyclo- pedia called the Wakan-sansai.zue (c. 1713; Japanese-Chinese collected

SHAPF.-SHIFTING HISTORY 47

illustrations of the three realms; hereafter Three Realms) compiled by an Osaka medical practitioner named Terajima Ryoan. The Three Realms drew on earlier Chinese sources (and images), especially a materia medica text called the Bencao gangmu (Japanese: Honzo komoku), but also pre- sented original observations and indigenous Japanese learning.30

In certain sections of this massive compendium, yokai appear right alongside other animals. In "fish types," for example, there is a short entry for ningyo, or "mermaid;' that includes a matter-of-fact description of the creature's appearance and also casually mentions the handy fact that ningyo bones can be made into a poison with "wonderful effect. "31 In another sec- tion there is an array of strange beings all more or less anthropomorphic, including the monkeylike enko and witchlike yamauba. Most descriptions include a straightforward presentation of physical characteristics, habits, and habitats, and they refer back to Chinese texts and earlier Japanese texts.

One of the entries, for the kawataro (related to the kappa), is notable because Terajima makes no effort to connect it to previous Chinese sources; he simply includes a picture of the creature (a hairy, monkeylike figure walking upright) and explains that it likes to steal certain vegeta- bles, challenge people to wrestle sumo, and pull cattle and horses into the water. In fact, one important dimension of the Three Realms is that it cites versions of yokai from earlier texts, both Chinese and Japanese, but it also references oral and local folklore. Because the Three Realms is a serious academic work, written presumably for a scholarly readership, the incor- poration of local beliefs like this helps to authenticate them as "facts" just

as valid as data extracted from older documents. The Three Realms also places yokai right next to other creatures, sue~

as rhinoceroses, that were not found in the wild in Japan. In a way this makes absolute sense: to an Edo-period reader in Japan, a rhinoceros would have been just as real or just as fantastic (if not more so) as a kawa- taro or a ningyo. All these creatures fit neatly in a set of books that aimed to document all things, whether seen or unseen.

Tori.yama Sekien and the Gazu Hyakkiyagyo series

During the first half of the Edo period, then, yokai appeared in the oral and written tales of hyaku-monogatari, in playful picture scrolls, and also

48 YOKAI CULTURE

in serious academic compendia such as the Three Realms. All these differ- ent forms come together in the work of a man named Toriyama Sekien (1712-1788), an artist who had the most significant influence on how we envision and understand yokai to this day. Sekien was born in Edo and was a follower of the Kan0 school of painting. Not much is known about his life, but there is speculation that he was a Buddhist priest and possibly served the Tokugawa government.

Sekien is most remembered for his four sets of illustrated catalogs, pro- duced between 1776 and 1784, that collectively document over two hundred different y0kai: Gazu hyakkiyagyo (1776), Konjaku gazu zoku hyakki (1779), Konjaku hyakki shui (1781), Hyakki tsurezure bukuro (1784 ). 32 Both in form and content, these books are a perfect combination of picture scroll and encyclopedia. Some images are directly modeled on the yokai in the earlier picture scrolls, and in fact it has recently been discovered that Sekien himself painted his own version of a Hyakkiyagyo emaki. 33 But what is most significant about his illustrated catalogs is that they are not picture scrolls. Like the Three Realms and other encyclopedic texts of the day, they are bound in afukuro-toji style with folded pages fastened with thread on one side. In shape and style they are roughly similar to today's paperback books, and they are read in the same fashion, by turning one page at a time.34

Each page ofSekien's catalogs features a separate entry, like you might find in an encyclopedia, with a black-and-white line drawing of an indi- vidual yokai and sometimes a description. The earliest set of catalogs, Gazu hyakkiyagyo, contains three volumes and a total of fifty-one yokai. There is relatively little writing with each image; often the text notes only a particular yokai's name and maybe a variant name. The entry on kappa, for example, states, "Kappa, also called Kawataro:' It is likely that in this first catalog, Sekien was drawing the best-known yokai, those creatures that were already so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination that no explanation was necessary. In his later catalogs, however, Sekien adds more text to the images. In part, this may be because he is introducing less established or regional yokai, creatures that need some explanation. But he also seems to be more playful in these later works, filling both text and illustration with lively puns and image play.

Sekien was creating a comprehensive yokai bestiary, but he also seems to have been having fun. And as he produced additional catalog

SH AP E-S HIFTI NG HISTORY 49

sets over the next few years, his writing and his images became even more inventive. Some of his yokai were adapted from the Three Realms, some were taken from picture scrolls, some from Chinese materials, some from local belief and legend, and more than a few were his own invention. According to one analysis of the more than two hundred dis- tinct creatures illustrated by Sekien, most are derived from Japanese folklore, art, or literature; fourteen come directly from Chinese sources; and eighty-five may have been fabricated.35

Many common yokai today may have started with Sekien, but even ifhe did not invent them from whole cloth, he certainly helped to popularize them. Through his books, creatures from China became Japanese yokai, and local yokai from all over Japan were presented to a mass readership. A yokai from one small corner of the country might be combined with yokai found in different regions, or under different names, to make a sort of generic yokai shared by a larger, national folk group.

Today, the inventive aspect of Sekien's work, along with its wordplay and tongue-in-cheek quality, is difficult for readers to appreciate. Recognized less for their humor and levity, then, his catalogs are often treated as the quintessential record of the yokai world. Even in his own day he influenced, either directly or indirectly, a number of important art- ists. He taught Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) and Utagawa Toyoharu (1735-1814); Utagawa would become the founder of the Utagawa line of painters, which included Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1797-1861), who in turn taught Tsukioka Yoshitoshi (1839-1892) and Kawanabe Kyosai (1831- 1889).36 Although their styles varied, and differed greatly from Sekien's, all these artists would eventually become known in part for portraying yokai and for illustrating supernatural narratives. Sekien's own works today are still referenced for their encyclopedic value, and his images and descriptions continue to inspire numerous contemporary manga artists and others.

Yokai as Characters: Kibyoshi

By extracting yokai from other texts and from local legends, Sekien helped disconnect them from their particular places of origin and from the nar- ratives in which they played a part. This made them more generic and

50 YOKAI CULTURE

more versatile, employable in all sorts of new places. And in fact, during the latter part of the Edo period, yokai haunted literature, art, and popular culture, everything from woodblock prints to Kabuki to rakugo storytell- ing. They especially thrived in a lighthearted genre of illustrated books known as kilJyoshi, or "yellow covers;' produced mainly between 1775 and 1806. Kibyoshi were a kind of kusazoshi (picture book), a popular form of comic book or graphic literature that came in a variety of styles-includ- ing red books, black books, and blue books. As the name implies, kibyoshi had yellow covers (actually they started out blue-green but faded to yel- low); a single kibyoshi narrative might consist of two or three separate volumes, each one only about ten pages long. Every page contained a detailed line drawing, and the space around the image was crammed with text-the books are often thought of as an early-modern version of manga. Of all the popular books of this time, the kibyoshi were considered the most sophisticated and the most satiric. In fact, one reason their produc- tion came to an end in 1806 may have been because the authorities did not

take kindly to their critical humor. 37 It was in part to facilitate this satire that kibyoshi drew on yokai as rich

stock characters; a particular yokai might stand in for an individual, a whole class, or a particular type of person. These texts, therefore, provide a glimpse into the Edo-period popular imagination. An example of how yokai were used is Bakemono no yomeiri (The Monster Takes a Bride, 1807), by Jippensha Ikku (1765-1831). During the eighteenth century there were picture books that depicted the marriage of two people (and the uniting of their families) through careful illustrations of various wed- ding rituals. Such books may have been simultaneously entertaining and used as manuals for prospective brides. The kibyoshi version parodies these books by adopting the same format but portraying all the characters as yokai, with ritual behavior appropriate only to the yokai world. Tsukumogami-style lanterns, each hopping on a single leg, help light the way, for example, and one yokai remarks that a storm is brewing-perfect weather for a wedding.38 It is a comical portrayal without much of a plot to speak of. But by showing human behavior through the topsy-turvy world of yokai, the author helps to defamiliarize, to make strange, a whole range of wedding customs and social standards that otherwise might go unquestioned.

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 51

For the most part, yokai in kibyoshi were anything but scary; they were goofy and comical, their language full of puns and topical references. This was an urban genre with a mass readership; like the encyclopedias and Sekien's catalogs, they must have spread a kind of shared understanding about yokai to people from all over Japan. That is, they would have made distinctions between yokai from different regions less pronounced.

Another important effect of kibyoshi is that they transformed yokai into "characters." Removed from its connection to a particular legend or belief, a given yokai could become an iconic image-like an advertising mascot-independent from text or tale. It was in the kibyoshi, for exam- ple, that an eerily cute tofu-carrying urchin called t6.fu-koz6 prospered, and where a romantic relationship between long-necked mikoshi-nyildo and long-necked rokurokubi bloomed.39

I have only scratched the surface of the Edo-period relationship with yokai. The humorous and cute characters of the kibyoshi were dynamic and innovative and became memorable icons that still influence our image of yokai today. The last one hundred years of the Edo period also wit- nessed a variety of other playful uses of yokai: they appeared in board games (sugoroku), shooting galleries, spectacle shows (misemono), and even a popular card game known as yokai karuta, which is remarkably similar to contemporary Pokemon.40

But these playful and ironic images of yokai did not kill off the frighten- ing folk creatures from which they developed. For example, the Kabuki play T6kaid6 Yotsuya kaidan (1825) by Tsuruya Nanboku IV (1755-1829) thrilled Edo audiences with its portrayal of the vengeful ghost of Oiwa- san, a story based on "real" local ghost stories. It was an exceedingly popu- lar fictional entertainment-but in order to avoid being cursed, the actors made sure to pay respect to the grave of the real woman on whom the Oiwa-san character was based.41

Similarly, yokai were still a subject of fascination for intellectuals as well. Famous kokugaku (national studies) scholar HirataAtsutane (1776-1843), for example, interviewed individuals who had been carried away by tengu or had had other supernatural experiences. He documented a report by a man who claimed to understand the chatter of birds, and by another who could recall his former life.42 Even as yokai were the subject of fun and games, they were also a matter for serious inquiry. Atsutane's investigations

52 YOKAI CULTURE

of the otherworld foreshadowed the folkloric study of yokai that would begin as Japan started to modernize in the years to come.

MODERN DISCIPLINES

During the Meiji period (1868-1912), Japan began a vigorous push toward what it called "civilization and enlightenment" (bunmei kaika). In a short time, the nation experienced rapid and momentous changes. The capital was officially moved to Edo, which was renamed Tokyo. Knowledge was actively sought from abroad by inviting foreigners to come teach and by sending promising young scholars to study in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, the educational system at home was revamped. And so ~as the military, as the nation began a series of wars and colonial incur- sions abroad (that would eventually culminate in Japan's involvement in W?rld War II). Social structures, such as the system that designated samu- ~ru as an elite class, were abolished. And government policies to rational- ize and organize belief systems were implemented, leading, for example, to the forced merger of local shrines throughout the nation. In cultural circl~, too, change was rapid and radical, even on the level of language an~ hterature, as evidenced by the genbun'itchi movement that strove to umte spoken and written Japanese.

Inoue Enryo and the Invention ofYokaigaku

With' th' · _ .i~ . is radical restructuring of society and culture, what happened to yokai. Simply put, during the Meiji period a number of Japanese scholars and ideologues, under the influence of Western scientific knowledge and ~ttitu~es, tried to demystify mysterious phenomena. In particular, a char- ismatic Buddhist philosopher and educator named Inoue Enryo (1858- 1~19) create~ the discipline of yokaigaku (yokai-ology, or "monsterology") with the objective of rationally explaining away supernatural beliefs so that Japan could become a modem nation-state.43 Enryo himself was a dynamic character, clearly a man on a mission, who was so obsessed with collecting and explaining supernatural phenomena that he was nick- named Professor Yokai (Yokai Hakase).

SHAPE - SHIFTI N G HISTORY 53

Enryo (or K.ishimaru, as he was known as a child) was born in 1858 in Echigo (present-day Niigata Prefecture), where his father was a Buddhist Priest at a small temple. A lot of energy was invested in young Kishimaru's education; he studied kangaku (Chinese learning) as well as Western and Japanese natural history and sciences, a mi.:>.."ture that would greatly influence his own philosophical interests and the later development of Yfikaigaku. He also trained in the Buddhist priesthood, taking the name Enryo when he was ordained.-H

In 1881 Enryo entered the Department of Literature and Philosophy at the University of Tokyo. He studied Chinese and Indian philosophies along with Western philosophy, particularly the work of Spencer, Hegel, and Kant. He also took courses in various sciences, history, and literature and was a founding member of the Tetsugakkai (Society of Ph ilosophy), an organization that is still active today. When Enryo completed his degree in 1885, he was the first Buddhist priest t o graduate from the uni- versity and the first graduate to specialize in philosophy.45

Enryo believed that by drawing on Western philosophy, Buddhism could be modernized and reformed. He also felt it was important for peo- ple from all walks of life-not just those with the chance to study at the University of Tokyo-to be exposed to Western philosophy. And with these objectives, he founded his own academy; opened in 1887 and called Tetsugakkan, the school would eventually develop into 10y6 University, which today has over thirty thousand students.

Clearly Enryo was passionate about philosophy, Buddhism, and educa- tion. So maybe it is not surprising that he also h ad an abiding interest in getting to the bottom of the mysteries of the world around h im, such as yokai, and a deep desire to tell people of his discoveries. Even in 1886, as plans were taking shape for Tetsugakkan, Enryo and som e friends formed an organization called the Fushigi kenkyiikai, literally the Mystery Research Society. The group seems to have been inspired by the British Society for Psychical Research, which itself had been founded in 1882- and is still active today.46 The Mystery Research Society actually met only three times, but Enryo had already embarked on his yokai research, publishing an appeal for information on "strange dreams, ghosts, kitsune and tanuki, tengu, inugami, shamanism, possession, physiognomy, prophecy, etc.," in order to analyze such phenomena from a psychological

54 YOKAI CULTURE

perspective and "'consider and report on the facts of yokai from each region."47

Throughout his life, Enryo traveled around Japan lecturing aboutyokai and collecting information on beliefs and customs. Additionally, he seems to have created a network oflikeminded colleagues and followers through- out the country who would keep him informed about local yokai in their regions. Before his death (while lecturing in China) in 1919, Enry6 wrote thousands of pages on the subject. His early magnum opus, Yokaiga'a: kogi, (Lectures on yokaigaku), was first published in 1893-189~ an.d ~s over two thousand pages long. He explains that this new academic disci-

pline, "'yokaigaku," is a form of enlightenment every bit as profoun~ as ~l the modern technologies that were changing Japan: "If through this [dis- cipline of yokaigaku], the light of a new heaven opens inside the hearts of the citizens, then is it too much to say that these achievements ~re ~ust as important as the installation of railroads and telegraphs? Herem hes the

"ty f th . ak "48 necess1 o e research and explanations of yoka1g u. At first glance it seems that Enryo insisted that mysterious phenomena

could not exist, that science and psychology could ultimately explai.n everything. But his thinking was actually more subtle than this, an~. his categorization of strange phenomena was complex. He divided yoka~ mt~ two broad categories: kakai (false or provisional mystery) and shink~ (true mystery). His goal was not to dismiss all mystery but to system.at•~ cally filter out meishin (superstitions), gokai (mistaken mystery), gi~ai (artificial mystery), and all sorts of other false mysteries that were deceiv- ing the Japanese people and inhibiting their enlightenment. After all the false mysteries had been weeded out one would be able to identify "true

' h" t e mystery." The ultimate goal of Enryo's yokaigaku was to locate t is ru mystery, the shinkai: the secret thing at the core of existence.

In service of this objective, Enry6 collected massive amounts of data on yokai from all over the country. Despite his expressed desire to de~unk mysterious creatures and phenomena, he certainly seems to have enjoyed telling people about them. It was through his work as a public intellectual, who lectured continuously and wrote numerous newspaper articles, th~t the wordyokai became part of the popular vocabulary. And the mountain of data Enryo collected still provides invaluable information for scholars today.

SllAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 55

Lafcadio Hearn and Spook.Y Tran.<>Lation

In 1891, when Inoue Enry6 was in his early thirties and already deeply

immersed in his yokai research, he traveled to the small city of Matsue in Shimane Prefecture. There he spent the morning of May 30 engrossed in conversation with a forty-year-old English teacher recently arrived from America.49 There is no record of what the two discussed, so we cannot know if they talked about y6kai. But it is certainly intriguing that the two men actually met: the English teacher, Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), would go on to become one of the most important foreign-language inter- preters of Japanese culture. Among other things, he would write exten- sively on the supernatural, folklore, religion, and yokai. Perhaps most famous among his many works is a book called Kwaidan, an early, roman- ized rendering of the word we have already seen as kaidan, or "spooky tales." Although Hearn's contribution to the understanding of yokai is rarely noted in books on the subject, it is important to include this enig- matic Greek-Irish-American-Japanese writer here as a key figure in the modern history ofyokai studies. Not only did he eloquently record some important narratives, but also his passion for the strange and supernatu- ral, and the deeper cultural insights they could provide, prefigured the work of Japanese scholars who would come after him.

Hearn led a complex life. He was born in 1850 on the Greek island of l..afkada (hence the name), the second child of a passionate affair between an Irish officer in the British Army and a local Greek woman. Several months later, his father was transferred to the West Indies, and his mother took baby Patrick Lafcadio Hearn to Ireland. She returned to Greece after two years, leaving the boy with a wealthy great aunt (on the Hearn sid~). In his teens, young Paddy was sent to a Catholic boarding sch~ol m England. In an accident at school, his left eye was blinded and slightly disfigured (it is in order to hide this disfigurement that Hearn is always turned to the side in photographs). Meanwhile, his great aunt lost her

fortune, and the family fell into poverty. . When he was nineteen, Paddy went off to America and ended up m

Cincinnati, where he quickly managed to become a successful newspaper journalist. He especially made a name for himself reporting on the se~m­ ier side of life-murders, slaughterhouses, garbage dumps, corruptwn,

56 YOKAI CULTURE

and the poor districts of the city. In his twenties, he moved to New Orleans, where he continued his successful journalism career, but this time drop- ping the "Patrick" in favor of his more exotic-sounding middle name,

"Lafcadio." He wrote a novel, Chita, and received a com mission to travel to the West Indies (especially Martinique), where he wrote another novel as well as a successful collection of nonfiction essays titled Two Years in the French West Indies. In all these places, Hearn-with his awkward appear- ance, his one good eye, his restless spirit, and an abiding interest in folk- lore, religion, and occult practices-always lived on the edge of the main- stream but wrote about people and places and his own experiences in a thoughtful, accessible prose style.

In 1890, Heam was commissioned to travel to Japan. The changes of the Meiji period were rapid and revolutionary, and he found himself pro- foundly interested in both the disappearing ways of the old Japan and the new emerging culture. In his first year in the country, while teaching English in Matsue, he married a woman named Koizumi Setsu. When he

became a Japanese citizen in 1896 he changed his own name to Koizumi Yakumo, taking the family name ~oizumi from his wife. Yakumo literally means "eight clouds" and can be understood more as "abundant clouds," or possibly"sacred clouds:' It is the first line of the earliest known Japanese poem, appearing in the same passage of the Kojiki in which Susa-no-O slays the Yamata no Orochi, and it is also a poetic reference to Izumo, near

Matsue, where Hearn met his wife. Heam subsequently lived in Kumamoto City for three years, went to

Kobe to work as ajournalist again, and then moved on to Tokyo t~ tak~ a position as professor of English literature at Tokyo Imperial University. Until his death of a heart condition in 1904, he published numerous books and essays on Japan, creating a body of work that, according to one b_iog- rapher, "is among the best ever written on that country, and is of continu- ing relevance."50 Hearn was a master of the essay form and wrote about ~erything from Buddhism to proverbs to incense to insects (he loved msects: ants, crickets, silkworms, and even mosquitoes). He also had a deep interest in spooky tales, and much of his work includes translated or r~tten versions of legends and literary ghost stories. Even his book titles, such as Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (1894), In Ghostly Japan (lB99), and Shadowings (1900), reflect this interest in the otherworld.

S 11 A P F. - S H I FT I N G H I ST O Ry 57

Published in 1904, the year of his death, Kwaidan is particularly full of spooky stories and includes such yokai as rokurokubi, mujina, and Yllki-onna

1-Ieam probably never mastered Japanese well enough to collect and translate these tales by himself. In his early years in the country, he relied on a translator or his wife to collect stories orally, and in later years he would carefully work through written texts, retelling them in his clear English prose.51 While his interests tended toward local legends, folktales, an~ beliefs, ultimately Hearn was not an ethnographer but a creative Wl"iter; his objective was not to scientifically record narratives but to re- create them in a literary format. And perhaps his skillful prose is one rea- son m f h · · l l · · any o t ese stones, part1cu ar y the ones m Kwmdan, are still well known in Japan today, and still readily available in translation more than a century after they were written.5 2

Hearn's importance to the history of yokai studies is twofold. First, he put great value on certain aspects of Japanese culture-yokai and kai- da?-at the very moment Enryo and others were working to banish them ~incompatible with modernity. In some cases, his embrace of everything . traditional" could be problematically nationalist, especially as Japan was 1~ the process of building its military and embarking on colonialist inva- sions. In fact, the publisher's introduction to Kwaidan notes that even as the book appeared, Japan and Russia were at war, and the publication of the volume "happens, by delicate irony, to fall in the very month when the world is waiting with tense expectation for news of the latest exploits of Japanese battleships."53 In the Japanese conte>..-t of modernization and Westernization, Hearn's interest in the strange and overlooked aspects of Japanese culture was particularly meaningful: in part because he was a respected teacher from abroad, his recognition of the value ofyokai tradi- tions brought them new attention and reconsideration. It also helped that he was a good storyteller, and that his skillful retellings were soon trans- lated back into Japanese, where they "became a much-loved part of the modern literary canon, familiar to every schoolchild."54

Secondly, Hearn was a romantic and a nostalgic. Unlike Inoue Enry6, he did not dismiss yokai as impediments to progress; he celebrated them as an intrinsic and meaningful part of Japanese culture-a culture that he saw changing in front of his very eyes. He felt there was value in collecting

58 YOKAl CULTURE

and understanding them for the insight they might offer into fading beliefs and shifting worldviews and what it means (or meant) to be Japanese. This attitude prefigured the approaches that would be taken by anumberofimportantJapanese scholars in subsequent years.

Ema Tsutomu and the Changing History ofYokai

One of these scholars, Ema Tsutomu (1884-1979 ), wrote a book called Nihon yokai-henge shi (Japanese history of yokai-henge) in 1923. Ema was not an expert on yokai, but he was the leading scholar of a field called fiizokushi-gaku, which was concerned with the history of customs and manners. Ema recognized the importance ofyokai in shaping and reflect- ing the broader history of the Japanese people. He was not interested in documenting yokai in order to debunk them; rather, his objective was to "look at how humans interacted with them in the past[,] ... the way our ancestors saw yokai-henge, how they understood them, and how they dealt with them."55

Ema's point is that yokai, whether you believe in them or not, have always been part of the human world and, therefore, have to be taken seri- ously. His own analysis examines a range of sources (including many of those already mentioned) and divides the history of Japan into several dif- ferent epochs. One of his arguments is that there is a distinction between yokai and henge. Henge was sometimes used interchangeably with yokai, but Ema suggests that the two words have different emphases, with henge being more closely associated with the notion of changeability. "If I were to give the definitions of both words;' he explains, "I would say yokai is an ungraspable mysterious nondescript, whereas henge is something that has

externally changed its identity."5 6 Ema creates a complicated typology of both yokai and henge, classify-

ing them by their ability to shape-shift, by the forms they generally take, and by when and where they appear. Most of them, he says, emerge in the evening and, depending on particular type, may inhabit mountains, shrines, houses, or the ocean. Although he finds mysterious creatures to be important during all periods of Japanese history-"since the beginning of time in Japan, our ancestors have had a close relationship with yokai- henge"-he also suggests that attitudes changed with the Meiji period.

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 59

Whereas in the past people were afraid of yokai, he explains, now yokai are afraid of humans.5 7

Ema's distinction between yokai and henge, his specific typology, and his historical analysis do not seem to have greatly influenced subsequent scholars. But his general attitude toward yokai is significant: for Ema, yokai are encoded with critical data from the cultures and times in which they thrived, and they can tell us about the values and beliefs of the people who created them. Unlike Inoue Enryo, Ema did not worry about whether yokai exist or not. And in distinction to Lafcadio Hearn, he did not set out to salvage them or cherish the eerie aesthetics ofyokai narratives. Rather, he simply argued that yokai are an integral part of Japanese history, and therefore we should study them.

Yanagita Kunio and the Folkloristics ofY6kai

This general attitude is paralleled in the cultural approach assumed by Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962 ). Yanagi ta was one of modem Japan's most influential thinkers, best known as the founder of minzokugaku, an aca- demic study translatable into English as "folklore studies; "native ethnol- ogy," or "Japanese folkloristics." Largely because ofYanagita's own inter- ests, even today minzokugaku is the academic discipline in Japan most closely associated with the study ofyokai.

Yanagita himself began exploring yokai early in his career. His most famous book, Tono monogatari (Tales of T6no), contains several refer- ences to kappa and zashiki-warashi, for example, and recounts a number of ghostly occurrences. He would go on to write about yokai in numerous short essays, often as part of his exploration of other issues and themes. For Yanagi ta, research into yokai represented a way to think broadly about Japanese folklore and folklife. Although he never devised an explicit methodology for interpreting yokai, we can extract three general theoreti- cal directions from his essays: (1) an acceptance of ambiguity, (2) collec- tion and categorization, and (3) a theory of degradation.58

The "acceptance of ambiguity" means that Yanagita was not concerned about whether yokai actually exist or not; like Ema, he figured that if peo- ple believed in their existence or told stories about them at some point, we should study them. Generally speaking, this attitude is now a given in

60 YOKAI CULTURE

folklore studies, in Japan and elsewhere, in which belief systems are not refuted but observed and interpreted. Du ring the early twentieth century, however, Yanagita's promotion of this approach stood in distinct contrast to Enryo's method and set the tone for future studies of yokai and, more generally, for the development of Japanese folkloristics as a discipline that sought to explain the interiority of people's lives.

As we have seen, "collection and categorization" ofyokai started at least as early as the Edo period, so Yanagita's interest here was nothing new. Yanagita's own collection of data on yokai entailed fieldwork (talking with people in various regions) as well as scouring documents and other writ- ten sources. In many essays, he provides examples of yokai and reasserts the need for further collection. Over several months in 1938 and 1939 he published a glossary of yokai called "Yokai meii" (Yokai glossary) listing seventy-nine different yokai. Most of the information was garnered from local gazetteers and folklore collections; each entry contains a short description of the yokai in question. s9

Yanagita's most notorious contribution to the classification of yokai is his distinction between yfu'ei (ghosts) and bakemono (or obake), intro- duced earlier. In short, he claims that bakemono "generally appear in set locations," haunting a particular place, in contrast to yiirei, which haunt a particular person. Yfirei come out only late at night, but bakemono prefer the "dim light of dusk or dawn; finding this border zone between light and dark the most productive for their purposes: "In order for people to see them, and be frightened by them, emerging in the pitch darkness after even the plants have fallen asleep is, to say the least, just not good business practice." Although many people have found exceptions to his rules, Yanagita's distinctions here are often cited in books about yokai and have been important in stimulating conversation on the topic. 60

The third aspect ofYanagita's approach to yokai is his "theory of degra- dation." In 1917 Yanagita wrote, "When old beliefs were oppressed and made to surrender to new beliefs, all the [old] deities [kami-sama] were ~egraded [reiraku] and becameyokai. That is to say, yokai are unauthor- ized deities."61 His point is that yokai were deities who had fallen in status; they were no longer sacred but still possessed some of their old supernatu- ral powers. Yanagita repeated this idea in a number of different essays throughout his career, using the devolution of yokai for measuring the

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 61

evolution of humans. As human beings progress and move into a modern way of life, he suggested, supernatural beings gradually degenerate from kami, objects of serious belief, to yokai, which are sometimes even comical. To a certain extent, this attitude reflects Yanagita's general approach to folklore and history; he saw many present customs as "surviv- als," or relics, of an older, bigger system of belief that had faded over time and was disappearing even more rapidly with the changes of the twentieth century.

Yanagita's attitude toward yokai, and to the beliefs of the "folk; contin- ues to influence scholars and writers today. As with other aspects of daily life that would become the subject of his folkloristics, Yanagi ta understood that it was not up to researchers to decide whether yokai had an objective existence or not; if yokai were part of the life of the people, then they existed as a meaningful and real part of Japanese culture and they should be studied as such. 62 By taking yokai seriously and giving them an impor- tant (if not central) role in the development of an entirely new academic discipline, Yanagita signaled to generations that followed that any study of culture could not ignore its monsters.

POSTWAR ANIMATION AND THE YOKAI BOOM

Animating Nostalgia: M'izuki Shigeru

Yanagita recorded yokai as a critical part of the Japanese cultural imagi- nation even as the nation was embarking on the terrible calamity of the Fifteen-Year War (1931-1945).63 During the second half of the twentieth century, while Japan recovered from the devastation of war and entered a period of rapid economic expansion and industrial growth, yokai took on yet another meaningful role. Yanagita had collected them as relics from a disappearing Japan; now they became infused with nostalgia as icons from a more innocent, prewar Japan that had already disappeared.

The individual most responsible for making yokai relevant during this period was the manga and anime artist Mizuki Shigeru (b. 1922). Unlike Yanagita, Mizuki is not generally characterized as a scholar; he is a crea- tive illustrator and storyteller who skillfully mixes history and folklore with invention and imagination to produce compelling narratives and

62 YOKAI CULTURE

memorable characters. Mizuki was deeply influenced by Yanagita, Sekien, and other scholars and artists who came before him, but ultimately it is Mizuki's manga and anime that most transformed the elusive yokai of folklore into the concrete yokai characters of contemporary popular cul- ture and mass media.

Mizuki's most significant manga series, which has been around for half a century now, is called Gegege no Kitaro (Spooky Kitaro); not only are the characters from this series famous throughout Japan today but also Mizuki himself is a well-known personality. In 2008, his wife, Mura Nunoe (b. 1932), published an autobiographical account of their life together called Gegege no nyobo (Wife of Gegege), which was made into a successful morn- ing television series in 2010 and a feature-length movie ( dir. Suzuki Takuji). Since the 1990s, Mizuki's rural hometown of Sakaiminato in Tottori Prefecture has been developed as a tourist attraction featuring a museum dedicated to Mizuki's work, along with the Mizuki Shigeru Road, a shopping street lined with more than 130 bronze yokai figures. In short, Mizuki is a nationally known personality, and his yokai characters animate contempo- rary Japan.

Mizuki was born Mura Shigeru in 1922. Although his family was from Sakaiminato, he was actually born in the city of Osaka, where his father was working, and moved to Sakaiminato with his mother one month later.64 He has written nostalgically of his childhood in this small port town, and particularly about an old woman named Nonnonba (Granny Nonnon) who ~ooked after him when his parents were busy. According to Mizuki's memoirs, Nonnonba was knowledgeable about the yokai world, and it was through her that he was first trained in the mysterious things residing around him.

Mizuki came of age during World War II and saw combat with the Japanese infantry near Rabaul in Papua New Guinea, where he lost his left arm. He has written movingly of his time in the military, of his strug- gles as a bumbling soldier and ofhis near-death through injury and illness in the tropics. While he seems to have despised most of his superior offic- ers, he portrays the natives of Rabaul with great affection, as true friends who cared for him when he was ill and suffering.

After returning to Japan, Mizuki studied at Musashino Art School and worked as an illustrator for kamishibai (picture-card shows) from 1950 to

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 63

1957; between 1957 and 1965, he wrote and illustrated kashi-hon manga, cheaply produced manga available for a small rental fee at shops through- out Japan. 6s His first critical success came with the 1965 magazine publi- cation of"Terebi-kun" (Television boy), the story of a boy who enters into televisions to participate in the world beyond the screen. "Terebi-kun" received the Sixth Kodansha Jido Manga Award and propelled Mizuki into the more lucrative world of magazine manga publishing. 66

It was as a kamishibai artist in 1954 that he first created Kitaro, the channing boy yokai who would become his signature character. The origi- nal production was called Hakaba Kitaro (Graveyard Kitaro), a title that Mizuki retained, with small variations, until his successful 1968 series, Hakaba no Kitaro (Ki taro of the graveyard), was to be made into an anime for television. The sponsors of the television version were concerned that having graveyard in the title would not be good for business, so Mizuki changed it to Gegege no Kitar6, a title derived from his own nickname as a child-Gege, or Gegeru (a mispronunciation of Shigeru).67 Gegege no Kitarobecame the title of the anime first and, subsequently, the title of the manga; in a sense this moment also marks the invasion of the postwar Japanese media world by Mizuki's yokai.

The black-and-white anime ran until 1969, followed by successive series in color: 1971-1972, 1985-1988, 1996-1998, and 2007-2009. There have also been a live action film (2007; dir. Motoki Katsuhide), video games, and even a new TV anime series based on an early version of Hakaba Kitaro. Through this skillful promulgation in a wide range of media, Mizuki's dis- tinctive yokai characters have become part of the popular imagination of children and adults in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Japan.

Because of this dynamic media mix, and with so many different epi- sodes and versions, Gegege no Kitaro narratives cannot be summarized concisely, but they generally involve the adventures of Kitaro and a cohort ofyokai friends. Kitaro himself is the progeny of a ghost family: an other- wise normal-looking boy, he wears magic geta sandals and a protective black-and-yellow chanchanko vest, and there is always a shock of hair covering the left side of his face. Kitaro is written with the character for oni (ki), a not-so-subtle reminder of his origins and affiliations.

Kitaro is frequently accompanied by another character, Medama-oyaji (Papa Eyeball), a disembodied eyeball with arms, legs, and squeaky voice

64 YOKAI CULTURE

(even though he has no mouth), who represents the remains of Kitaro's dead father and is often pictured perched on Kitaro's head or shoulder.68

Many of the episodes in the series involve Kitaro, Medama-oyaji, and other regular yokai characters teaming up to fight for the survival of good yokai and good humans against evil yokai and evil humans. Mizuki also celebrates the ambiguous nature of yokai; one of the other regular charac- ters, for example, is the ne'er-do-well Nezumi-otoko (Ratman), a mischie- vous trickster figure who is both friend and foe of the boy hero.

Kitaro, Medama-oyaji, and Nezumi-otoko are Mizuki's original crea- tions. But Mizuki is also a scholar of yokai folklore and history, and many of his characters are adapted from the work of Sekien, Yanagita, and oth- ers. For example, one famous character in Ki taro's yokai gang is Nurikabe, or "Plaster Wall," mentioned earlier, which Mizuki extracted directly from an entry in Yanagita's "Yokai Glossary." By illustrating a wall with arms, legs, and eyes, he transforms what Yanagita described as a vague phenom- . enon into a solid, free-standing character. Similarly, Sunakake-baba, the Sand-Throwing Granny, was also a relatively obscure yokai whom Mizuki

lifted from "YOkai Glossary" and made into a star. Mizuki's narratives are full of other yokai mined from folklore and pre-

vious texts. Moreover, in addition to his narrative manga, he has also pub- lished numerous illustrated catalogs consciously reminiscent of the Edo- period bestiaries ofToriyama Sekien. Indeed, in many ways Mizuki might be considered a modern-day Sekien, using the popular media of his day not only to document yokai but also to invent new ones. And just as Sekien's eighteenth-century images exerted enormous influence on the understanding of yokai in succeeding years, so Mizuki's images powerfully shape the popular imagination of contemporary Japan. Although Mizuki has published many other yokai-related manga, such as Kappa no Sanpei (Sanpei the kappa) andAkuma-kun (Devil boy), he is still most famous for Gegege no Kitaro: the manga, the numerous anime series, and all sorts of spin-off goods and products, from key chains and cell phone straps, to

plastic figurines, clothing, and even canned coffee. Mizuki's hometown of Sakaiminato, with its yokai statues and Mizuki

museum, has become a Mecca for yokai lovers from all over the country- tens of thousands visit each year. You can find tourists of all ages clustered next to each small bronze statue along Mizuki Shigeru Road. Grandparents

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 65

stoop to carefully read the engraved nameplate, parents chat nostalgically, and children excitedly shout out the name of each yokai character the moment they recognize it. For children in particular, these yokai are con- temporary celebrities, stars of 1V and film and video games. For older visitors, they inspire nostalgic memories of their own childhoods-when they heard tales of yokai, perhaps, or more likely when they first encoun- tered Mizuki's manga and anime. Recalling his own excitement when vis- iting the road, eclectic writer and scholar Aramata Hiroshi (b. 194 7) explained, "Even if my head has been corrupted by old books and ciga-

rettes, my heart, it seems, is still a child's."69 . In fact, this is the power of Mizuki's yokai-they emit a potent nos~gta

for a time that is now gone (if it ever existed in the first place). Yokai nar- ratives and beliefs may have been extracted from village life, debunked by

_ . . ks b v. o-ita Kunio, but Inoue Enryo, or put mto the pages of hbrary boo y i.anao· . Mizuki's work makes them seem alive again. And as living charactealrs. m

. . . h th were also ive his manga and amme, they re-create a lost time w en ey in everyday life-or at least, in an imagined everyday life of the past, one

that is created by the longings of everyday life in the present. . . . . k d by his characters,

There is no denymg the real sense of nostalgia mvo e · d ction company

but we should remember that Mizuki himself and his pro u te . dia to promo

(Mizuki Production) are also extremely skilled at usmg me . . . . . . fj lklonc prece-

h1s creations. Many of M1zuki's yoka1 characters may have 0 d d d marke , copy-dents, but they are ultimately a distinctive bran • tra e f -kai but

righted, and marketed with great skill. Mizuki is a documenter 0 yo ary . . . In contempor

also a producer and popularizer of his own yokai VISion. uld J h. . d l . . d . ular culture that you wo apan, is images are so eep y mgrame m pop I · l'kely

. . "th them t IS I be hard-pressed to find a child or adult unfam1har WI • older that without Mizuki's prolific work over the last half a century, man\ oks _ . l ated to library 0

yoka1 of folklore would have been forgotten or re eg . ular "th his own partic

and museum shelves. So even as he inflects them WI . . . . . . h ltural imagination. spm, M1zuki has kept these creatures alive m t e cu

Urbanizing Yokai: Miyata Noboru

Just as Mizuki, a creative artist, was in part inspired by Yanagita's ~ork on yokai, so too were professional scholars, especially those affihated

66 YOKAI CULTURE

with Yanagita's own discipline of folkloristics. For the most part these researchers adhered to Yanagita's theoretical framework. But in 1985, a folklorist named Miyata Noboru (1936-2000) published a book titled Yokai no minzokugaku (The folklore of yokai), which used the concepts of borders (kyokai) and the city (toshi) as "keys to break open the deadlock. "7° This new perspective was important because it helped rescue folkloric yokai from being written off as nostalgic rural icons from the past, and brought them into contemporary culture so they could be understood once more as an aspect of the lived experiences of real people.

For example, in discussing the Kuchi-sake-onna, the female yokai pro- tagonist of urban legends that had circulated wildly throughout Japan in 1979, Miyata links her appearance in modern urban and suburban set- tings to earlier, more rural yokai, such as yamamba, a mountain-dwelling witchlike woman (sometimes called yamauba). He demonstrates conti- nuity not just with the image of the yokai itself but also with emotional, geographic, and social factors that give birth to yokai. Similarly, he seeks to connect random urban crimes that were occurring in Tokyo to the Edo- period yokai phenomenon known as kamikiri (hair-cutter), in which a person would suddenly discover that her hair had been sheared off.

Miyata's focus on place ("the topology ofyokai;' as he puts it) also builds on earlier suggestions by Yanagita that yOkai haunt the borderlands. But Miyata pushes these ideas further, exploring examples of strange occur- rence at crossroads, on bridges, and in the no-man's-land outside the safe space of everyday life. The city, of course, is filled with these uneasy, dan- gerous places that belong to nobody. In effect, Miyata developed a field of urban folklore studies that does not deny connections to the past or to rural areas, but which also recognizes that "folklore involving mysterious phenomena is constantly being exchanged within the glittering spaces of large modem urban centers."7•

A New Y(jkaigaku: Komatsu Kazuhiko

At the same time Miyata was exploring strange phenomena in the city, folklorist and anthropologist Komatsu Kazuhiko (b. 1947) was beginning to develop a new yokaigaku. Like Miyata, Komatsu observed the way in

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 67

which borders played a role in determining who was human and who was an outsider. In a seminal 1985 book titled Ijin-ron (Theories of the stranger), he examines so-called ijin-goroshi (stranger-killing) legends, in which a wandering beggar or mendicant priest is murdered while passing through a village. Sometimes, through the phenomenon of communal illusion (ky(id(j gensii), the crime is hidden under a thick layer oflegends- often concerning yokai and yiirei. Although this book does not focus on yokai per se, in the last chapter Komatsu looks toward a new theory that would explore links between yokai and concepts of otherness, suggesting that sometimes yokai can be interpreted as folkloricized versions of out- siders (including outcastes/outcasts).'72

Whether this social model of yokai actually represents the beginnings of anewyokai theory or simply a new perspective on previous approaches, it signaled Komatsu's own deepening interest in exploring yokai in fresh ways. One of his important early contributions, for example, revisits the difference between yokai and kami. He updates Yanagita's "degradation theorY' by stressing the fact that both yokai and kami possess supernatu- ral powers. What determines whether they are kami or yokai is whether or not humans worship them-so the movement can go both ways, from kami to yokai or from yokai to kami, depending on the needs of the society in question. To understand yokai, then, you have to understand the people for whom they are important, and this requires a broad, multidisciplinary, humanistic approach.

Komatsu presents these ideas as part ofa reevaluation ofy0kai studies in his 1994 book, Y(J/caigaku shink(j (New thoughts on yokaigaku); more than a century after Inoue Enryo coined the term, Komatsu proposes a new yokai-ology:

The new yokaigaku is a discipline that researches the yokai that humans imagine (create), that is, yokai as cultural phenomena. Just as with animals, plants, and minerals, the form and attributes of yokai existence cannot be studied without considering their relationship with human beings; they always reside within this relationship with humans, within the world of human imagination. Accordingly, the study of yokai is nothing other than the study of the people who have engendered yokai. In short, yokaigaku is "yOkai culture studies [yokai bunka-gaku]," a "human-ology [ningengaku]" that seeks to comprehend human beings through yokai.73

68 YOKAI CULTURE

As part of developing this new yokaigaku, Komatsu-under the aus- pices of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (known as Nichibunken), a national research institute located in Kyoto-organized a series of interdisciplinary research workshops to study yokai from a vari- ety of perspectives. Participants included scholars of literature, folklore, history, art, anthropology, sociology, and religion, as well as museum cura- tors, photographers, and novelists. All together, these various workshops met some sixty-two times from 1997 to 2013, leading to the publication of dozens of books and articles and the creation of three public databases of yokai research material and images through an ongoing "yokai project."

Komatsu himself first became interested in yokai in graduate school while exploring setsuwa and picture scrolls in which references were made to mono-no-ke, spirit possession, Onmyodo, and shugendo (aesthetic reli- gious) practices for warding off demons and illness. He also learned about a community in the mountains of the island of Shikoku that still practiced rituals of this nature as part of a religious system called Izanagi-ryii.74

During his initial fieldwork in that community, he felt a sense of strange- ness, as if he were simultaneously in the Heian period and the present. So his initial interest in yokai was spurred by this exciting mixture of past and present, and methodologically he felt it was important to combine archi- val and historical research with ethnographic fieldwork. He felt there was a conception of something between what is visible and what is invisible that played a distinctive role in Japanese culture and could not easily be classified under a particular academic subject heading; this "mystical thinking" (shimpi.-shiso) spanned literature, art, history, and religion and was part of people's everyday lives. His classification of yokai, then, is pur- posely inclusive and "provisional" in order to encompass the "complexity" of the way yokai are written about, spoken about, and illustrated.

He suggests that what we find surprising about yokai should not be sur- prising-those things that seem strange to us now can be understood through carefully examining the ideas and practices of the past and tracing how things came to be the way they are. That is, yokai are a window into something else-into popular thought and Japanese culture. Ultimately, Komatsu stresses, defining yokai is not important; rather, we should learn to read through the "yokai-ish thing;' using it as a lens with which to explore "what is on the other side," the "message" of the text or belief in

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY 69

Which yokai appear. This is a way for people to get a deeper grasp of Japanese culture-and to achieve a different perspective on their own cul-

titre, whether Japanese or Western.75

Komatsu and many of the other people involved in the study of yokai Produce work that is highly accessible and well read by the general public. In fact, Komatsu purposely chooses to write some of his texts so that they can be understood by high-school-age readers.76 Any major bookstore in Japan today has a few shelves devoted to Japanese folklore, and there ~s usually a subsection specifically dedicated to yokai. Sometimes there IS even a smaller subsection devoted to Komatsu's writing and edited volumes.

In 2012 Komatsu became director of the International Research Ce ' . · tment to the helm of nter for Japanese Studies. In one sense, his appom .

. ts that yokru are no a maJor government-funded research center sugges . l · al for understanding onger a marginalized topic of study; their v ue J h mment On the apanese culture is, as it were authorized by t e gove ·

1 "

other hand, the fact that their v~lue for understanding "Japanese cu ~re h h ter of sometimes as been authorized in this way places them at t e cen . h.b k n

J se Nie I un e problematic discussions of what it means to be apane · U h a itself was established in the 1980s under the directorship of " m~ ~" rr. k h. J pan-first nat1VIS ia eshi (b. 1925), a philosopher notorious for is a f oting "d cused o prom I eology, and Nichibunken has sometimes been ac

Nihonjinron, discourses on the uniqueness of Japan. 77

d h esearch , rean ter

A great deal has changed since Umeharas tenu ' h 1 and for . . d. . linary SC 0 ars mstitute has come to be known for its inter 1scip A~· coun- h from other .n;:oian osting foreign researchers, many of whom come arch and

. tsu's own rese ' trtes, such as China, Korea, and Vietnam. Koma . al·st Having

l. ·t1 nation 1 · the work of his yokai workshops, is never exp ICI Y h t dy of yokai, kn ber that t e s u ac owledged that, however, we should remem ese history and

because it is so deeply intertwined with discourses of Japan ment can . d" b the govern '

.culture, and because it has now been "sanct1one Y particularly as easily slip into commentary on the uniqueness of Jap.an: duct of h . a distinct pro t ey become recognized in other countnes as f t" alist or

J . d t be part 0 essen i apanese culture, yokai are dangerously poise 0 ,, And orientalist discussions about "weird;' "wacky;' or "inscrutable Japand. h h . . f -k · n get us beyon sue t at Is why, hopefully, the senous study o yo a1 ca

70 YOE.Al CULTURE

positions-by understanding where they come from, we can see that yokai are not, after all, so surprising.

As I have suggested from the outset, Japanese yokai are specific to Japan-that is, they are molded by the particular history and culture of the group of islands that is now called "Nihon" (Japan). To be sure, then, y0kai do tell us something about the "Japanese" experience, but they also tell us a lot more: about how people understand their world, about artistic and narrative expression, about the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next, about science and religion, and on and on. Komatsu may have first come across what he calls "mystic thinking" in Japanese texts, but as the history of monsters and the supernatural in other coun- tries also reminds us, such thinking is clearly not limited to Japan. Ideally, the study ofyokai gestures to something beyond Japan-to the study of human culture-and the new ycl'kaigaku can work to transcend the lan- guage of essentialism.

Best-Selling Yokai: Kyogoku Natsuhiko

Although Komatsu's books are well read, he is still working within an aca- demic environment. The current star of the creative yokai world (other than Mizuki Shigeru, who remains exceedingly popular) is the best-selling novelist Kyogoku Natsuhiko (b. 1963). Kyogoku grew up with the manga and anime of Mizuki, whom he credits as a direct influence on his own career. He is also a serious researcher and has worked with Komatsu and other scholars (he participated in K.omatsu's yokai workshops).

KyOgoku is almost supernaturally prolific. Since his debut novel in 1994, he has written dozens of books and hundreds of short stories and essays. Many of his novels are so long they are easily spotted in the paperback sec- tion of a bookstore: bricklike books dwarfing their neighbors. His fiction has been adapted for television, film, manga, and anime. He also publishes research articles, edits academic volumes on yokai, lectures widely throughout Japan, and appears annually in forums and panel discussions, where he always draws a huge crowd. He is a celebrity in both the literary and yokai worlds, and his work brings these two worlds together.

Born in Hokkaido, Kyogoku attended the Kuwazawa Design School in Tokyo, worked for a while at an advertising agency, and set up on his own

SHAPE - SHIFTING HISTORY 71

as a designer. Legend has it that one day, with no warning, he simply brought a massive manuscript to the Kodansha publishing house; the resulting book was Ubume no natsu (The Summer of the Ubume), a runa- way best seller. Set in 1950s Tokyo, The Summer of the Ubume is a mystery story told in the first person by tabloid writer and novelist Sekiguchi Tatsumi, and it features a cantankerous but brilliant used-book dealer named Ch\lzenji Akihiko, generally called by the name of his shop, Kyogoku-do. The complex narrative surrounds the yokai ubume; in the process the book mentions Sekien, Enryo, and Yanagita, and it explores questions of belief and psychology. Parts of the novel read like an intro- duction to yokaigaku. All the characters are quirky, and the unlikely hero, Kyogoku-do, seems like an odd mixture of Inoue Enryo and Abe no Seimei, cloyingly scientistic but simultaneously privy to the mysteries of the otherworld (and the human mind).

The Summer of the Ubume is the first work in Ky0goku's "Hyakkiyagyo series" of novels, each of which features many of the same characters found in the others and draws on a Sekien yokai for title and motif. The theme of each story reflects the nature of the particular y0kai, resulting in a unique blend of the mystical atmospherics of y0kai fiction and the rational deductive methods of a modern detective novel. Kyogoku's writ- ing is famous for its sophisticated use of difficult kanji, and the books themselves are known for their high production values and stylish design.

Kyogoku has also written numerous short stories, often set in the Edo period and presented under various different "hyaku-monogatari" titles. Nochi no kosetsu hyaku-monogatari (Subsequent hyaku-monogatari rumors) won the prestigious Naoki Prize for popular fiction in 2oo3. Moreover, Kyogoku is extremely adept at crossing into other media; his second novel in the Hyakkiyagyo series, for example, Moryo no hako (The box of the moryo, 1995), was made into a manga, anime, and a live action film.

Along with yokai researchers Tada Katsumi and Murakami Kenji, Kyagoku has published an informal roundtable discussion called Yokai baka (Y()kai crazy, 2001). With Aramata Hiroshi and Mizuki Shigeru, he is one of the driving forces behind a triannualjoumal called Kai (The strange) that began publication in 1997 and advertises itself as the only magazine in the world completely dedicated to yokai. It publishes scholarly articles (by

72 YOKAI CULTURE

Komatsu, among others), as well as roundtable discussions, manga, analy- ses of Sekien's images, short fiction, and photographs.78

Kyogoku has expressed deep admiration for Mizuki Shigeru, and even jokingly claims to "want to become like that old man in forty years."79 And indeed, like his mentor, Kyogoku is a celebrity, known not only for his creative genius and prolificacy but also for his personal style. Unlike most contemporary writers, for example, he often appears in public wearing a traditional Japanese kimono. And, mysteriously, he always wears black, fingerless gloves.

Boom

Since the 1980s, Japan has experienced a "yokai boom." Although it is impossible to quantify what actually makes something a boom, it seems that the combination of manga, anime, research, fiction, film, and other manifestations of yokai and yokai-related material in popular culture reached a tipping point of sorts: suddenly, in the 1980s, yokai became vis- ible and commercially profitable. The continued production of yokai manga, anime, and video games suggests that they still are. At the same time, serious research into yokai also continues. Occasionally an undis- covered text will come to light-an otogizoshi or kibyoshi-and experts such as Tokuda Kazuo or Adam Kabat will explore what they reveal about how people once understood yokai. Komatsu's work in particular has spawned a whole new generation of researchers-people such as Kagawa Masanobu, Yasui Manami, and Iikura Yoshiyuki-who continue to expand the boundaries of the new yokaigaku.

For the sake ofbrevity, my historical summary here has focused prima- rily on people and texts related to yokai per se, but other fields are closely associated. For example, recent Japanese horror movies, known as J-horror, draw on many folk ideas and images, often developing them in modem settings with contemporary technology. And the internationally recognized anime of Studio Ghibli are steeped in yokai lore and tradi- tional imagery and ideas. Takahata Isao's Heisei tanuki gassen: Pompoko (PomPoko, 1994)drawsdirectlyon tanuki legends as well as famous hyakki- yagyo images. And Miyazaki Hayao's films, from Tonari no totoro (My Neighbor Totoro, 1988) to Mononoke hime (Princess Mononoke, 1997) and

SHAPE-SHIFTING HISTORY

Figure 2. Big names ofyokai studies. Back row.from left to right: Inoue Enryo, Mizuki Shigeru, and Ema Tsutomu. Front row.from /,eft to right: Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo), Komatsu Kazuhiko, Yanagita Kunio, and Kyogoku Natsuhiko. Original illustrations by Shinonome Kijin.

73

Sen to chihiro no kamikakushi (Spirited Away, 2001), are creatively inspired by the yokai world. And this is to say nothing of Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh! and the explosively popular Yokai Watch, which are all directly and indirectly related to yokai folklore.

If all of this is part of the so-called boom, then it has been going on so long now that perhaps it is not really appropriate to call it a boom. Rather, it is simply that yokai, in many different shapes and in a huge range of media, are an indelible feature of contemporary Japanese cultural life and-given their proven ability to adapt to new forms of expression-will remain that way for years to come.