This is Byakko, the white tiger. It’s got a lot of cultural significance in Chinese astrology (which was imported to Japan from China, like many things). I’m not familiar with any particular stories or myths about Byakko, other than that it represents the west in Chinese astrology.

This picture will be our New Year’s card, or nengajo. It seemed a sin, being an artist, to just buy ordinary New Year’s card, particularly because nengajo are kind of the equivalent of the “Christmas letter” which many families in the US send. They’re not as long, being a postcard rather than many sheets of printed out paper on corny stationery, but they often have photos of the kids or the family, updates, and things like that. So ours will be entirely void of valuable information and instead just be a giant white tiger. Oh yeah, and 2010 is the Year of the Tiger, which is why I picked Byakko. So there you go.

Byakko

The yokai are all being posted to my Etsy store, http://osarusan.etsy.com. They will be available as high quality, archival fine art prints, matted and mounted on acid-free board, just like my other Etsy prints. There will also be special deals for buying 10 yokai prints, or the entire set.

Anyone interested in buying one of the original paintings should contact me by email.

Obviously 100 yokai is too many to paint in one day. I decided, for the sake of time, just to do 5 panels of yokai, with 27 more yokai. Unfortunately, I was called in to work on Saturday for 7 hours, so I lost a huge chunk of my painting time. I worked all night, painting like a demon, and I almost finished them all before midnight EST, but I need another 2 hours or so to finish the final touches. But I promised yokai on Halloween, and it wouldn’t be a-yokai-a-day if there weren’t a yokai today… so here are five:

Hyakki Yako (panel 1)

I will post the remaining 4 panels just as soon as I finish the final touches, but right now I need a shower and a nap badly. I’ll update this post in a few hours with the others. They should be up before noon on November first, along with their names.

Happy Halloween!

~Update:

Well, as soon as I finished them, my internet access went down, so I wasn’t able to upload them last night. But here they are, only slightly late due to situations beyond my control… Acts of Yokai, perhaps?

The yokai in panel one are (from right to left) Tengu, a very famous, wise, and powerful bird-goblin; Kawauso, a river otter which, like many animals in Japan, develops magical powers as it ages; Uwan, a harmless incorporeal monster that lives in temples and shouts, “UWAN!” just to screw with people; Nekomata, a kind of ghost cat who develops magical powers after tail has grown long even to fork in two, giving it magical powers including creating fireballs, shapeshifting, and reanimating corpses; and Tesso, a cursed monk who tranformed into a swarm of rats and laid waste to an enemy temple.

Hyakki Yako (panel 2)

Panel two contains a class of yokai known as Tsukomogami — household items which become conscious and magical after a long time, usually 100 years. Generally they are harmless, animate spirits, but there are exceptions to that rule. This procession starts with Bakezori, a sandal; Karakasa, a paper umbrella; Chochinobake, a paper lantern; Ittan-momen, a roll of cotton cloth — this one is a little more malicious than the others, often attacking humans by wrapping them up and smothering them; Biwa-yanagi, from a kind of musical instrument called a biwa; Furu-utsubo, an old archer’s quiver; and Morinji-no-okama, a tea kettle.

Hyakki Yako (panel 3)

Panel 3 is full of more monstrous, animal-like yokai. The leader of this procession is Aosagibi, a glowing blue heron which flies at night, appearing as a fireball; Kirin, the famous unicorn-like-dragon-like-lion-like-horse-thing found throughout East Asia. In Japan the kirin is the most powerful of all spirits, ranking above dragons and phoenixes. It’s also famous for the brewery of the same name, which makes my favorite beer, Akiaji (my nurarihyon was drinking it too); Baku, another chimeric monster composed of bear, rhino, cow, elephant, and tiger parts, who devours dreams and preys on the spirits of the diseased and plague-ridden; and Ushi-oni, a demon bull which comes in many varieties — this one being the head of an ox attached to a hairy, six-legged, spider-like body.

Hyakki Yako (panel 4)

Panel four’s yokai are getting a little creepier, but not so horrible yet. The leader of this line is Abura-sumashi, the oil-presser, who is the ghost of a man who stole oil and is now cursed with a squat, straw-covered body and a potato-like head; Hyakume, a pretty self-explanatory monster whose named means “100 eyes”; Shokera, a monster who climbs on roofs and peers in through skylights on sleeping people, occasionally attacking them; Tsurube-otoshi, a giant, disembodied head which preys on travelers by dropping out of trees and devouring them; and Akashita, a hairy beast with a long, red tongue that hides in the clouds and guards floodgates.

Hyakki Yako (panel 5)

Panel five has a couple of truly frightful yokai, though nothing as bad as the onryo from October 30th. The leader of this part of the parade is Nuribotoke, a corpse with popped-out eyes dangling by the optic nerve who crawls out of family Buddhist altars (remember to close the shrine at night!); Hitodama, a basic ghost which is pretty much identical to the English Will o’ the Wisp, a sometimes-malevolent soul embodied in a ball of light which likes to mislead people into danger in the night; Aoandon, the spirit who appears after the Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai, the Edo-era game of ghost-story telling in which 100 candles are lit and 100 ghost stories are told, each one progressively scarier — one candle is snuffed after each story until the final candle is extinguished, and this ghost appears. Sort of a Japanese Bloody Mary or Candyman; Harionago, a barbed-haired ghoul who appears as a beautiful lady with long hair done up. She walks the streets until she comes across a man, and then she laughs. If the man laughs back, she undoes her hair and then rips him to pieces with the hooked barbs on the end of each strand; Betobeto-san, and invisible yokai who walks the streets at night, following people with the sound of its footsteps — betobeto; and Nure-onna, an giant woman-headed snake, said to grow up to 300 meters long, who waits on the shore, washing her hair. She often carries a small bundle which looks like a child in an attempt to lure strangers to come and attempt to help her. After they pick up the bundle, it becomes incredibly heavy and prevents them from running away, after which the nure-onna uses her long, snake-like tongue to suck all the blood from their body. Sometimes she also works in consort with other sea monsters.

So there you have it! A grand total of 58 yokai throughout the month of October. It was a great pleasure painting these, and I think I could go on painting them forever. One a day was an incredibly pace to keep up, and it was worth it, but there’s only so much a painter can do in one day… I’m sure I’ll come back to yokai in the near future and paint some more detailed, full scenes instead of rushing to finish in one day. But in the meantime, I want to say thanks for keeping up with my site this month, and thanks for putting up with the snags I had on the final day of the project.

Finally, I hope you’ll keep coming back to see my art. You can bookmark my site, or my RSS feed, or fan me on Facebook to keep up with what I’m doing. And if you liked the yokai, you can support my art by buying prints on my Etsy store (I’ll be adding the yokai within the next few days).

Thanks for viewing! Stay tuned for my next painting!

Both Japanese and Western ghosts usually have a powerful motive for their vengeance. But what makes an onryo so much scarier than its Western vengeful spiritual counterpart is that, while the Western ghost ceases to haunt once it is put to rest, an onryo appears and never goes away. There’s no concept of justice in an onryo’s revenge; in many stories the ghost will terrorize a village, murdering hundreds of poor, innocent souls in the most unimaginable fashions, but she rarely takes revenge on the actual cause of her unrest (usually a nasty husband). If Scooby and the Gang went to Tokyo to solve a mystery, they’d no doubt pull the rubber mask off old farmer Jenkins, call it a night, and then die in a horrible freak Mystery Machine accident, their bodies flayed and twisted into physically indescribable forms.

Onryo

There’s some confusion as to how to define yokai and bakemono in Japanese folklore, which one is a subset of the other, and whether or not yurei — ghosts — fit into either category or exist on their own. There doesn’t seem to be a clear definition of either term, but from my understanding of them I think that “yokai” is a pretty encompassing term that collectivizes all supernatural beings in folklore, Japanese and non-Japanese alike. Whether bakemono are a subset of that or just a related term, I don’t know, but I definitely think that yurei and their kin (like onryo and zashiki-warashi) fit in as a type of yokai, rather than stand alone.

Today’s yokai makes 30, and tomorrow is Halloween! Tomorrow will be my last yokai! Where do I go from the onryo, who made me lose so many hours of sleep?? Come back tomorrow to find out, and have a good Halloween! (And don’t be a jerk and pretend not to be home when the kids come trick-or-treating!)

Anyway, the stories about Japanese mermaids are generally not happy ones. They are often harbingers of bad luck, and fishermen who were unfortunate enough to catch a ningyo would quickly throw it back and hope nothing bad would happen to them.

There’s another story, from right here in good ol’ Fukui prefecture. A long time ago, in the southern half of the prefecture, then called Wakasa province, a fisherman caught a strange fish and decided to serve it up to his friends. One of the friends took a peek in the kitchen to see this odd fish and noticed it had a human face, so he warned the other friends not to eat it. So they all did the old napkin trick, and hid the fish, planning to throw it out later. However, one of them got really drunk, forgot to throw it out, and later gave it to his daughter. After she ate it, she stopped aging, and it’s said she lived in Obama city (that’s right, Obama!) until the ripe old age of 800, when she took her own life (after seeing her friends, husband, children, grandchildren, and so on all pass away).

Ningyo

Anyone want some sushi?

This is Wanyudo, a horrible being from Hell, said to be the soul of a tyrant daimyo who was known for drawing them on an oxcart. Now he roams the road between Earth and Hell, stealing the souls of anyone unfortunate to get too close and dragging them back to hell. The wheel is a pretty important symbol in Buddhism, which may also carry other connotations about this demon’s eternal punishment.

I like this yokai because it’s so Dante-eqsue. I guess the image of Hell where tormented souls are forced to relive their own crimes is not just a Western thing. Very cool monster!

Wanyudo

A few people have asked me if I’ll be selling prints of these. The answer is most definitely yes! Not until November though… October is far too busy with painting yokai every day to make up prints of these, but some time in early- to mid-November, I’ll start putting prints up on my Etsy store. Thanks for your support!

I think this is one yokai I was required to paint. It fits right in with the Chickens of the World series, so it would almost be wrong not to mention it. Plus, I really like the idea of a ghost-fire breathing chicken. It’s similar to another one of my favorite monsters, the English cockatrice, a chicken with a deadly gaze that can kill people in an instant, or turn them to stone. Seriously, who comes up with this stuff??

Basan

In one story, a traveling samurai is invited by a beautiful woman into a shack to hear her play the biwa. As he listened to the music, she bound him up in her webs and then ate him.

In another story, a woodcutter was chopping wood near a waterfall inhabited by a jorogumo. He accidentally dropped his axe in the water, a beautiful woman appeared and returned it to him. She made him promise never to tell anyone that he saw her, and he kept the secret for a long time. However, one day he got drunk and told the story of what happened by the waterfall — he never woke up the next morning.

In yet another story, a jorogumo became a guardian of a pool in the woods, rescuing people from drowning. The locals erected a small shrine there and worship her as a goddess.

In any case, whether she’s good or evil — or neither — she certainly makes an awesome Halloween monster!

Jorogumo