Andre’s Reviews > An Introduction to Yōkai Culture: Monsters, Ghosts, and Outsiders in Japanese History > Status Update

If it weren't for these two pictures with with border deities, this chapter on bourders would be a complete waste of time and space.

Why is this here? There has been one mentioning that over time mountain holy people devolved into yokai and now there is the topic of human sacrifices , but where on earth is the connected to yokai truly? Sure it is interesting to read about potential human sacrifices both as reality and in legends like this monk killing an ape-god who wanted such sacrifices, but why is it here?

Why is there a chapter on outsiders and sacrifices?

And the yurei chapter is over. Still wonder why it is here, respectively takes over so much space.

I ask myself what the difference between yurei & yokai is supposed to be. The author definies a yurei as the soul of a dead person in the form it had when living. and seems to follow another author who states that when a yurei loses its name, it can only be called an obake (monster), when it loses its "self" as a human individual it dissappears or transforms into something else. So lots of ghosts here are yokai then.

yamauba being miko once? Whether that really holds true.

tengu noses as phallic symbols, symbols of homosexuality and consequently infertility? He doesn't elaborate on that.

So emperors, aristocrats, warriors and monks who fail in their various political and battlefield struggles were transformed into tengu. It was that easy?

Buddhist monks straying from the path could become tengu... that is new.

Tengu could be considered unique to Japan, but so are other yokai, so why call out tengu? And btw. It is still a bit annoying to read about all these studies.