Yōkai

Also Known As: 妖怪; also bakemono 化け物, obake お化け, mononoke 物の怪, ayakashi あやかし; from 妖 “bewitching, calamitous” and 怪 “strange, suspicious”
Region/Culture: East Asia
Mythos: Japanese Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A vast open category of Japanese supernatural beings and events, ranging from invisible malign influence to fully drawn creatures with names, habits and home districts.
Role in Mythos: Yōkai supply Japanese folklore with its explanations for illness, drowning, disappearance, disorientation and every other ordinary disaster that had no visible cause.
Relation to Humans: Most yōkai live at the edges of human settlement and become active exactly where people are least protected, on night roads, at river crossings, in empty houses and in the hour after the lamps go out. They are rarely worshipped and rarely destroyed, and the usual human response is avoidance, ritual cleansing, or naming the thing so it can be lived alongside.

On a scroll kept at a sub-temple of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, a parade comes down the street after dark. A three-legged kettle walks on human feet. A lute has grown arms. A straw sandal, worn through and thrown out, has sprouted a single bulging eye and a lolling tongue, and it hops along behind the rest. The ink is over five hundred years old and still black, and the joke inside the picture is not entirely a joke. These are the things people threw away, coming back up the road.

The word for them is written with two characters, one meaning bewitching or calamitous, the other meaning strange, suspicious, hard to account for. Its oldest surviving appearance in Japan sits in the Shoku Nihongi, the court chronicle completed in 797, in a passage describing a purification carried out to sweep accumulated yōkai out of the imperial palace. Nothing in that entry has a face. Yōkai there is closer to a condition than a creature: bad air in the corridors, a run of fevers, the sense that something in the building has gone wrong and needs clearing out.

That formlessness held for centuries. In the middle Heian period the preferred word was mononoke, and it turns up in the writing of the women of the court. Sei Shōnagon records it. Murasaki Shikibu writes of mononoke that have become quite dreadful. Neither describes what one looks like, because nobody thought there was anything to look at. A mononoke was an invisible pressure that arrived with an illness and left when the right prayers were said over the sickbed, and the only evidence of it was the patient.

By the Edo period the common term had shifted to bakemono, the changing things, and the emphasis had moved from what could not be seen to what would not hold still. Foxes and tanuki were long credited with the ability to take another shape and walk into a village as a travelling monk or a beautiful woman, and the word stretched easily to cover them. It also stretched, a little awkwardly, over beings whose forms never changed at all: the kappa in its river pool, the rokurokubi whose neck unwinds across the sleeping room.

Then in 1776 an artist named Toriyama Sekien published Gazu hyakki yagyō, an illustrated catalogue of the night parade, and the whole category changed shape. Sekien gave the yōkai portraits and captions and laid them out like a reference work, one to a page, calm and orderly, as though documenting local birds. Some he drew from genuine village report. Others he invented outright and presented with a completely straight face, and they entered the tradition anyway. His tenjōname, the ceiling-licker, is a tall thin thing with a long tongue that accounts for the dark stains high in the corners of old rooms. There is no evidence anyone believed in it before he drew it. People believe in it now.

The effect of that book is easy to underestimate. Before it, a yōkai was mostly a story about what happened; after it, a yōkai was a picture with a name, and the picture came first. On a cold night in a farmhouse with the fire banked low, a sound starts in the rafters, a slow wet dragging. In the morning there are dark streaks on the boards above the beam, and everyone in the house knows exactly what has been in the room, and nobody looks up.

There is no yōkai anatomy, and that has to be said plainly rather than papered over. The category holds a river child with a beaked mouth and a shallow dish of water set into the crown of its skull, a mountain ascetic with red skin and a crow’s beak and a feather fan, a woman whose head travels the length of the house on a neck like unspooled rope, and an oiled-paper umbrella that grew one eye and one leg and learned to hop. The scale runs from something the size of a moth to something the size of a hill. What they share is not a body but a position. They turn up at the edges of the settled world, at dusk, on a bridge, at a crossroads, in a house that has stood empty a season too long.

One rule inside the category is unusually specific. The Tsukumogami-ki, a Muromachi picture-scroll, teaches that a tool or vessel used for a full hundred years acquires a spirit of its own, and that if it is discarded at that point rather than honoured, it takes the insult personally. The scroll shows household implements swept out during the year-end cleaning, gathering in the dark, and going down the road together on the night of Setsubun carrying a grudge. Every kettle and sandal and lute in the Daitoku-ji procession is one of these. The lesson attached is domestic and practical: mind what you throw away, and how.

Yanagita Kunio, who built the study of Japanese folklore in the twentieth century, argued that the traffic ran downhill. Gods that lost their worship did not vanish, they slid, becoming smaller and stranger and less feared with each generation, ending as monsters and finally as characters in stories told to children. His example was the kappa, which still has shrines here and there and which he took to have begun as a water deity owed real respect, before centuries of demotion left it a mischievous river imp with a taste for cucumber. He also drew a line between obake, tied to a particular place, and yūrei, tied to a particular person. The line has never held very well.

Komatsu Kazuhiko, whose definition is the one most used now, cuts the whole sprawl down to something workable: transcendent phenomena and presences associated with fear. That covers the powers, because the powers are all versions of one job. Yōkai possess and sicken. They lead travellers off the path and turn a familiar hillside into an hour of walking in circles. They take another shape and get themselves invited indoors. They pull swimmers under, steal rice, blow out the lamp. What every one of those acts has in common is that it accounts for something: a drowning, a sudden fever, a night spent lost within sight of home, an old stain on a ceiling, a child who did not come back. Yōkai are the shape an explanation takes when no other one is available.

Their limits come from the same place. A yōkai is bound to its ground and its hour and cannot follow anyone far past either, the kappa is helpless once the water spills from the dish on its head, and dawn ends most encounters without a fight. The deeper weakness is that they cannot survive being explained. Yanagita’s slow demotion works partly because a named, drawn, catalogued yōkai is already half tame, which is what Sekien did to them at scale and what Mizuki Shigeru did again in 1968, when his GeGeGe no Kitarō became a hit and the entire menagerie moved into television. Sakaiminato, the town where Mizuki grew up, now has a street lined with 177 bronze yōkai, and children pat them on the head on the way to the station. The ceiling-licker still accounts for the stain. It just no longer stops anyone sleeping.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a yōkai?

A yōkai is any of the strange beings, spirits and inexplicable phenomena of Japanese folklore, from the kappa in its river pool to an umbrella that has grown an eye and a leg. The word covers a huge and deliberately loose category rather than one type of creature. Komatsu Kazuhiko’s widely used definition calls them transcendent phenomena and presences associated with fear.

What is the difference between a yōkai and a yūrei?

Yanagita Kunio drew the standard distinction: an obake or yōkai is tied to a particular place, while a yūrei is tied to a particular person. A yōkai haunts a bridge, a pool or an empty house and waits for whoever comes along; a yūrei follows the individual it has business with. In practice the two categories overlap constantly and the line has never held cleanly.

Where does the word yōkai come from?

Yōkai is written with two characters, one meaning bewitching or calamitous and the other meaning strange and hard to account for. Its oldest known appearance in Japan is in the Shoku Nihongi, the court chronicle completed in 797, which describes a purification performed to clear accumulated yōkai out of the imperial palace. At that stage the word meant something closer to an inauspicious condition than to a creature with a body.

Can ordinary objects turn into yōkai?

Yes. The Muromachi-period Tsukumogami-ki teaches that a tool or vessel used for a hundred years gains a spirit, and that discarding it at that point rather than treating it with respect earns its resentment. Such objects are called tsukumogami, and the walking kettles, animated lutes and one-eyed straw sandals in the old night-parade scrolls are all examples.

Who was Toriyama Sekien?

Toriyama Sekien was the Edo-period artist who published Gazu hyakki yagyō in 1776, an illustrated catalogue that gave yōkai fixed pictures, names and captions arranged like a reference book. Some of his entries came from genuine folk report and others he invented himself, including the ceiling-licking tenjōname, but the invented ones passed into the tradition regardless. After Sekien, a yōkai was as much an image as a story.