If You Are Japanese,

these are the stuff of nightmares,

actually some of them look pretty scary even if you are not Japanese,

the images featured here are from a Japanese painted scroll known as the Bakemono zukushi, the artist and date is unknown, though its thought to hail from the Edo-period, sometime from the 18th or 19th century,

across it’s length are depicted a ghoulish array of “yokai” from Japanese folklore, in his The Book of Yokai, Michael Dylan Foster describes a yokai as:

a weird or mysterious creature, a monster or fantastic being, a spirit or a sprite … creatures of the borderlands, living on the edge of town, or in the mountains between villages, or in the eddies of a river running between two rice fields, they often appear at twilight, that gray time when the familiar seems strange and faces become indistinguishable, they haunt bridges, tunnels, entrance ways, thresholds and also lurk at crossroads,

the class of yokai characterized by an ability to shapeshift, and that featured in this scroll, is the bakemono (or obake), a word literally meaning “changing thing” or “thing that changes”. The founding father of minzokugaku (Japanese folklore studies), Yanagita Kuno (1875–1962), drew a distinction between yurei (ghosts) and bakemono: the former haunt people and are associated with the depth of night, whereas the latter haunt places and are seen by the dim light of dusk or dawn,

 Nobusuma (のぶすま) has a brown body, human-like face, spiky hair, claws, and sharp black teeth.

 Odoroshi (おどろし) is a red-faced monster with big eyes, black teeth, and long hair.

Rokurokubi (ろくろくび), a long-necked woman is pictured next to an Inugami (犬神) dog spirit, the one film I remember with a character similar to one of the ones featured above was in a cult classic,

 Onibaba (鬼婆, lit. Demon Hag), it is a 1964 Japanese historical drama horror film written and directed by Kaneto Shindo, the film is set during a civil war in the fourteenth century, Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura play two women who kill soldiers to steal their possessions, and one, the mother, appears to conjure up a demon, I have featured a few highlights from the scroll (see the whole thing complete here), the digitisation of which appears to have come from the International Research Center for Japanese Studies – Yokai Database, many thanks to Pink Tentacle, from whom I have taken the image descriptions, if you want to learn more about yokai in general then do check out Michael Dylan Foster’s fascinating The Book of Yokai, and no I am not on commission, I just thought the demons a bit scary, well some of them!