Significantly expanded and updated-a lively excursion into Japanese folklore and its increasing influence within global popular culture.

Monsters, spirits, fantastic beings, and supernatural creatures haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yokai, they appear in many forms, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water sprites, to shape-shifting kitsune foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Popular today in anime, manga, film, and video games, many yokai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. The Book of Yokai invites readers to examine how people create, transmit, and collect folklore, and how they make sense of the mysteries in the world around them.
Revised and expanded, this second edition of The Book of Yokai features an all new yokai picture gallery-with dozens of stunning color images-tracing the visual history of yokai across centuries. With additional entries and fifty new illustrations, Michael Dylan Foster unpacks the history and cultural context of an even larger cast of yokai, interpreting their varied meanings and introducing people who have pursued them through the ages.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
Names, Dates, Places

PART I. YOKAI CULTURE
1. Introducing Yokai
Yokai, Folklore, and This Book
The Language of Yokai
Event Becomes Object
Questioning Yokai
2. Shape-Shifting History
Heroes of Myth and Legend
Weird Tales and Weird Tastes
Modern Disciplines
Postwar Animation and the Yokai Boom
3. Yokai Practice / Yokai Theory
Yokai Culture Network
Zones of Uncertainty

PART II. YOKAI CODEX
4. The Order of Yokai
5. Wilds
6. Water
7. Countryside
8. Village and City
9. Home

PART III. YOKAI GALLERY
10. Seeing Yokai
11. Illustrating Yokai
12. A Completely Incomplete Yokai Exhibition

Epilogue: Monsterful
Notes
Bibliography
Alphabetized List of Yokai in the Codex
Index