Status Updates From The Book of Yokai: Mysterio...

And I am done.... holy shit, the rest of the book is notes and all, almost 100 pages!!!!

The grimelickers, finally, I really wondered whether they would ever come up. And these are the freakiest yokai so far, the others are really tame and mundane looking for my standards.

Oh come on, it is a dog with a human face. On the creepiness scale that is not even a three in compared to all the other shit that I have seen,

A human faced bovine that predicts the future is nothing. In fact, so far, these yokai have been incredibly mundane in both look and behavior from my perspective.

While it is interesting to read certain lesser known details about well known yokai, like the nue once being a bird or the one-eyed rascal possibly originating with human sacrifice where the potential victim gets his eye poked out before, I have the problem that most of these yokai are already familar to me.

Mostly these snow woman stories sound quite different from this one popular tale. The latter is full of romance and all and apparently a creation by a guy called Hearn which became popular in Japan and used common japanese folklore motives.

So the Feejee mermaid came from Japan and originally was supposed to present a ningyo.

So the human faced tree may have originated from a Persion illustration of Alexander the Great.

So an edo-period depiction of the nurikabe doesn't show a wall but a flat-faced three-eyed elephant.

Hm, I had never seen the element that Tengu were once humans who failed in Buddhism and so became Tengu.

Oh, so tsuchigumo (earth-spider) might have been a derogatory and demonizing term by Japanese for the indigenous inhabitants of Japan. Granted, that is apparently in mythological texts, so who knows whether these people ever existed.

That oni section sure was long. Albeit not much new stuff for me here

Yeah.... this chapter on how the yokai sections are ordered really could have been left out, there was no reason for it.

Gosh, did 1/3 of the book really have to deal with all this history stuff and all these many many authors and books? Who would be able to remember even half of it and I don't think that most people reading this, really care about that part. Heck, it was a chore for me to sit through.

Funny, I can't remember anyone, ever, portraying Yamata no Orochi as having trees on its back. I can't even remember 8 tails being portrayed, only 8 heads

Hm, he mentions that depicting ghosts without legs is a japanese tradition and that made wonder: Was that exported to other parts of the world? Because in pre-20th century depictions of ghosts here in germany, they always have legs but later on you see in fiction ghosts without legs.

Ok, now that the book deals with terms like mononoke, bakemono, oni and yokai the reading experience is much better.

Why are introduction always so boring?