KAPPA - Yokai of Japan

LINK
http://kappapedia.blogspot.jp/2015/01/yokai-monsters.html

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Reviving Japan's Dreaded and Beloved Ghosts
Tanuki, the badger-like, shape-shifting creatures of Japanese lore, are a rascally, impetuous bunch. In one tale, a tanuki playfully transforms into a steam train but then gets flattened by a real train coming from the opposite direction. In another, a tanuki kills an old woman and makes soup out of her, then takes her form and feeds the soup to her husband.

Fantastical monsters like the tanuki abound in Michael Dylan Foster's "The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore" (University of California Press), one of several books about yokai that have hit American shelves this year.

In June, Zack Davisson will publish "Yurei: The Japanese Ghost" (Chin Music Press), a critical look at the history of some of Japan's most dreaded and beloved spooks. Both are scholarly texts enlivened by images of the beasts in scroll paintings, woodblock prints and original illustrations.



Michael Goldstein's "Yokai Character Collection" (PanAm Books) is more pictorial. It has the gruesome look and feel of a Dungeons & Dragons manual, with Japanese peeping toms and anthropomorphic umbrellas taking the place of knights and gnomes. The book's illustrator, Chip Boles, seemed to have fun imagining what beasts like a mokumokuren, a "sliding door filled with hundreds of eyes," and a kappa, a water demon often blamed for drowning horses and humans, might look like.

And then there's Matthew Meyer's forthcoming "The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits," an encyclopedic look at yokai that includes notes on each creature's appearance, behavior and favorite hangouts. Mr. Meyer's paintings combine the vibrant colors of traditional Japanese woodblock prints with references to Asian horror movies and contemporary manga. The result is a coffee-table book (self-published) that doubles as an illustrated guide, full of legends and obscure yokai trivia.
Why the recent crop of yokai books in the United States?

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New texts and stories are still being discovered and translated, and the abundance of source material can be a blessing and a curse for yokai researchers. How do you define a creature that can vary from period to period, or even town to town? "When I see yokai mentioned, it will often just say 'a kappa is a so-and-so,' "
Mr. Foster said. "So my responsibility is really to complicate that, so that people will understand that a kappa can be many different things, depending on where and when you're speaking of it."

There are also beasts whose stories have been lost, but whose images remain, like the tofu-kozo, a bigheaded servant boy holding a block of uncooked tofu. "There's a number of images of that, but nobody knows why they exist," Mr. Foster said. "It might have been an Edo period advertising campaign, but that's all speculation."

Among the creepiest of yokai are the yurei, spirits of the dead who look nothing like typical Western ghosts. In "Yurei: The Japanese Ghost," Mr. Davisson, a translator of a number of classic manga, profiles several yurei. Two of the most famous are the tragic Okiku, a young girl who threw herself down a well (or was thrown) after breaking one of her master's prized dishes, and Oiwa, a hapless wife cursed with just about the worst husband ever (she is usually depicted with her left eye dripping down her cheek, the result of her spouse's botched attempt to kill her with poison).



Yurei have inspired countless paintings and illustrations over the centuries, but perhaps the most influential is Maruyama Okyo's "The Ghost of Oyuki" (1750), a portrait that the artist made of his recently deceased lover. Her ghost — long black hair, pale clothing, no feet — appeared to him in a dream, and his painting set the visual mold for every Japanese ghost to come, from paintings and prints to Kabuki characters and horror films. "After that painting," Mr. Davisson said, "that's how they all looked."

Fans love tracking these evolutions over time, as well as learning every bit of information about as many yokai as they can. This might explain why a lot of these books, scholarly or not, have the look and feel of illustrated encyclopedias, with detailed descriptions of scores of creatures.

"When you look at pop culture in Japan today, a lot of it is really based on this desire to catalog, this sort of encyclopedic imagination," said Bill Tsutsui, a Japanologist and author of "Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters."

Why do the centuries-old monsters continue to fascinate, even for readers who don't necessarily have a collector's bent? "There's the mystery of the world about them," Mr. Tsutsui said. "You get that in this folkloric sense of the past: that the real world around us is beautiful and wonderful, and yet can be really horrible, too."
- source : ROBERT ITO - NYT -

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