Yokai Illustrated Volume 1: A Color Field Guide to the Weird and Wonderful Creatures of Japanese Folklore

One of them licks your bathtub clean at night. Another waits on the road as a burning cartwheel with a human face.

Japan spent centuries putting a face on everything a village feared and everything it found funny, and it called them yokai. This first volume gathers twenty of them and gives each one a full-page color plate and the whole story behind it.

Every creature is drawn by Kuro Hoshi in the style of Edo-period woodblock prints, and every plate comes with a short profile that tells you where the thing lurks, what it wants, its most famous run-ins with humans, and what it says about the culture that imagined it. Not a name under a picture. The actual legend.

What's inside

• 20 creatures, 20 full-page color plates, drawn for this book.
• The ones you already half know: the river Kappa, the two tengu (Karasu-tengu and Hanadaka-tengu), the two-tailed Neko-mata, the chimeric Nue and the giant O-dokuro.
• The ones that frighten precisely because they are domestic: Futakuchi Onna, the woman with a second mouth; Onibaba; the ship-sinking Umi-bozu; the drowned Funa-yurei; and Tsuchi-gumo.
• The ones that are pure absurdity and exist anyway: Akaname, who licks the filth off your bath; Azuki Arai, washing beans by the river; plus Tofu Kozo, Tearai Oni, Wanyudo, Konaki Jiji, Tesso, Zashiki Warashi and Seto Taisho.
• An introduction to where yokai come from: village rumor, their golden age in the Edo period with Toriyama Sekien's Gazu Hyakki Yako (1776), and their return through manga and anime.

Why this one

The big Japanese bestiaries offer four hundred entries in small black-and-white print with pictures that never fill the page. This does the opposite: fewer creatures, better told, each with its illustration taking the whole sheet in full color. It is written to be read, not consulted. Macabre but light, dry-humored, made for adults who want to understand Japanese folklore without being lectured.

Who it's for

• Manga and anime readers who finally want the origin legends behind the creatures they already recognize on screen.
• Collectors of comparative mythology whose shelf is still missing Japan.
• Tattooists, illustrators and artists hunting traditional visual reference.
• Anyone who says they love Japan, and who will open it the same evening.

Volume 1 of the Yokai Illustrated series. Open it anywhere. One of the twenty is already looking back.